Ad Violations: Why Search Engines Won’t Display Your Site If it’s Infected With Malware

As your website’s webmaster have you ever seen an e-mail from Google like this?:

Hello,

We wanted to alert you that one of your sites violates our advertising policies. Therefore, we won’t be able to run any of your ads that link to that site, and any new ads pointing to that site will also be disapproved.

Here’s what you can do to fix your site and hopefully get your ad running again:

1. Make the necessary changes to your site that currently violates our policies:
Display URL: site.com
Policy issue: Malware
Details & instructions:

2. Resubmit your site to us, following the instructions in the link above….

If so, you know the potential downside risk this poses for your website. In their own words, Google says:

In some cases, you may be unaware that you have malware on your site. But to protect the safety and security of our users, we stop all ads pointing to sites where we find malware.

In essence, Google and Bing care about their searchers more than your business so, to protect their customers, they’ll shut your website out of Adwords and Bing Ads and will offer your site less frequently in organic searches.

Often overlooked in the search business is the role of the actual search engine in the ad placement process. These are businesses that specialize in creating algorithms to show relevant search results, assigning quality scores to your landing pages and placing your actual ads. A lot goes into the process, but in all cases, the key for the search engine is to show relevant search results (including ads) that keep people using their search engine. It is in this spirit that search engines like Google and Bing reserve the right to refuse your ads. This is especially true if they have any reason to believe that your site may be infected with malware–including viruses, worms, spyware, and Trojan Horses–or is being used in phishing schemes.

From the search engine’s perspective, this makes perfect sense. Searches are their lifeblood and there are other search engines a person could use to find websites. By showing your ads or returning your site organically in a search, they are tacitly telling the searcher, “We found these sites to be relevant to you.” If they start sending you to sites that are potentially harmful, then a searcher could, potentially, switch search engines.

However, knowing why search engines work as they do doesn’t make it easier to be a webmaster when a site is hacked. Luckily, our clean up and malware removal tools as well as our de-blacklisting service are just a click away.

Or, better yet, keep yourself from ever getting an email like the one above from Bing or Google. Instead, protect your site, and business, from potential problems stemming from malware, blacklisting or phishing and look into protecting your site with a website application firewall like our CloudProxy WAF .