Google’s Human Error: Potentially Bad Business for Search Marketers
Yesterday, Google accidentally tagged all search results as "malware":
The official explanation is on Google's Blog:
Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs.
This is alarming for Search Engine Marketers who rely too much on the search engines for their business. A "human error" could suddenly render your site useless - resulting in zero income.
Why? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used by businesses to rank for search results. If someone types in "beds" on Google, a smart business would have a website on beds coming up on Google's first page. Now if the website was marked "malware" would customers still click on it? Probably not.
Lesson for web marketers? Find other lead-generation and traffic sources. In fact you must always have at least 3 different marketing channels.
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February 2nd, 2009 - 21:26
Now that’s why when I was searching yesterday, whatever I click keeps on saying that warning about “malware” message. Ooops for google.
February 3rd, 2009 - 08:06
Or you were actually seeing real malware sites.
February 3rd, 2009 - 08:14
Yeah possible, but I was clicking the same link that i visited earlier that day. I dismissed the message and thought its probably in my computer setting. (not so knowledgeable about computers)