This story is developing as I write this, so mainly this post is just a place to collect my thoughts, and broadcast them to the wider community, of which hopefully I can find some help in resolving the problem. Google thus far have not been helpful.

Today a client of ours rang to ask us to help them sort out a serious problem. When you visit their website, http://actioninspections.com.au, you get a warning that their site is probably going to harm your computer. (I’m worried now by linking to it Google might block us too, but we’ll see)

The Google Safe Browsing page for the problem said that Google had never found any malware on the site of any kind. So you can imagine how my frustration started to rise at this point; Why block a site that is perfectly safe?

The suggestion was to use the Google Webmaster Tools to check into it, but there too, I was told there was nothing wrong with the website; The aforementioned safe browsing page suggested I could use the webmaster tools to request a malware review, which would seem to be the way foward, but because Google never found any malware, there is no option to request a review!

A scan with the AVG Website Scanner reveals no malware present either.

Internet Guru @northirid (via twitter) pointed out that there was some spurious javascript being called from kollinsoy.skyefenton.com; That’s clearly the problem that tripped the warning in the first place, but we are still left with no way to have Google stand down, despite having fixed the problem.

Hours after Google began blocking access to the site, it’s tools are only now reporting that in fact there IS malware on the site (even though right now, there isn’t). Now we have access to the Google review process, but we can only guess how long it will take before someone fixes the problem;

Despite that progress, the Google system never tells you what the malware is, or where it was found. It seems pretty stupid not to give people that information, as larger sites could have thousands of pages and take days to check each one. If Google were serious about helping people, this information would be immediately provided.