In summary, this is a program that resides on your computer and activates when you visit the website of a major search engine. It works on Google, Yahoo and MSN - didn't check any others.
Green Checkmark icons mean that McAfee has sniffed your site and they don't have anything bad to say about it. They check your site for popups, safe downloads, spam, viruses, who you are linking to - and they even subscribe to your email list to see what you will send to them. Then when a surfer mouses over the icon next to your SERP listing a brief report can be seen. (SEOMOZ had a Green Checkmark).
This brief report lists how many downloads were tested, how many emails they received from you and even rates the content of the email. If your site has a Red X beside it (like the one above) that means you have been doing something naughty like sending out 18 "spammy" emails per week (lol).
Yellow Exclamations mean that users should be careful on your site. I saw some fairly well known sites with Yellow Exclamations for downloads that might have spyware or adware or other unwanted programs. And a Grey QuestionMark means that McAfee has not evaluated your site yet - and I saw very few of these in the SERPs - but did spot Grey on Oilman's site and Chris Hooley's AdWords - funny ads :-)
So, why am I reporting on this here? We didn't turn this product on intentionally and I did not buy it. It must have been included in a recent install of McAfee. However, it did divert us from "work" for about thirty minutes. The first thing we did after learning about this tool was to search for our own websites to be sure that they didn't have us flagged for spammy emails, dirty downloads, or worse. I wanted to be sure that anyone using the product didn't see any of my sites in a bad light. Fortunately they were all fine - but data like this in front of surfers could be damaging to your sales.
If you own some important sites, send lots of email to your list, or have some programs served by download, it might be worth the time to be sure that you have Green Checkmarks.
Follow up to my original post: McAfee was quick to respond to my email (the next morning, even on a Sunday). My concern was acknowledged and my ticket was put into their support queue. Within a couple of days, I found out their "serious threat" rating was triggered by a security breech in our forums (Invision Board), which occurred in February -- an unauthorized iframe injection into the forum mySQL database. While the iframe was removed after a few hours and the forum discontinued altogether within a day or two, evidently SiteAdvisor scanned our site just at the wrong moment.In any event, SiteAdvisor has re-issued our site a green safety rating but it takes up to four weeks to propagate through their database. I can't complain too much but it still seems a bit like a case of punishing the victim. It would be nice if SiteAdvisor made an attempt to notify the website owner when a serious problem is found, but oh well.
Thanks for reporting back! Good luck!
One of our clients was given a red/"spam" rating by SiteAdvisor and accused of sending 1.4 spammy emails per week. Ironically, the client doesn't send out any emails at all. The only thing we could figure was the site was hosted on a shared server (as many of them are) and email addresses were somehow obtained.
The client site has since changed hosts, been put on a virtual private server and we've contacted McAfee. It seems, once a site is reviewed, the reviewers never return to see if the problem persists. We have posted rebuttals on the detailed page for the site, but I doubt users ever click through to see the "owner comments," which are at the bottom of the page.
Our email to McAfee did receive a prompt reply and we were told, "Please allow approximately eight weeks for the new data to mature and propagate through our system." Three weeks and counting ... we'll see.
Site advisor says the following in respect of issues:
''We quickly review all site owner concerns and promptly correct mistakes. We don't allow sites to pay to be rated or to change or improve their ratings. Site owners who wish to communicate with McAfee should start by visiting our Webmaster page.''
Very Nice post.
I have few questions hope get Answered by people here.
I noticed that even when the option to disable Site Advisor is disabled, the user can still just click on the X to the left of the toolbar and close it. Is that the same thing as disabling Site Advisor?
Does it only monitor Internet traffic via the IE toolbar, so if the user closes the toolbar or uses some other browser such as Chrome or Firefox, you do not receive any reports of the internet traffic and the user is not warned or blocked from malicious websites or links?
Can alerts be set in ePO to send an email report if Site Advisor is disabled?
One More question SEO related.
Does it effect the website's ranking ?
Regards
Farhan
Any website is safe for brawse if those are marked as clean:
You can check any website from sucuri.net.
How to add my website at "SiteAdvisor"?
SiteAdvisor has falsely blocked our domain, seedrack.com, as a serious browser exploit threat. It is rather ironic in that we have always taken such pride in providing a safe and secure environment -- no pop-ups, no spam email, no redirects or anything tricky or questionable in any way. We've been doing this for 7 years and have built a successful ecommerce business. But here SiteAdvisor comes along and intercepts all traffic to our site from users of their software. Paid links (adwords, etc.) are captured, as well, though of course we're still paying for the clicks. I do not know the total number or percentage of SiteAdvisor users, nor how long our site has been falsely identified (it just came to my attention yesterday), but there is no doubt that McAfee's "mistake" is damaging our business and costing us money.I'm in the process of contacting McAfee (and others) and will provide updates here, in case anyone is interested. I'm hoping that no legal action will be necessary, but we are certainly prepared to pursue whatever legal remedies that may be required. I think software such as SiteAdvisor could potentially be quite useful, but there are evident pitfalls.
Good luck. Let us know what you learn.
Not sure how I missed this. I missed your post(I always read your posts/articles Egol) and any articles elsewhere on it. That is unusual as I get news on nearly everything like this :P
Anyways it is interesting. I personally do not like McAfee. There virus protection is much lower than some of my current software but this update may be useful. This may help deter traffic from spam sites which for adwords would lower their position and keep adwords more relevant. Just have to see what happens...
I am glad to see something more mainstream noticing all this stuff at last.
I picked up on this a few months back from reading some forum posts where peoples' business was being strangled by bogus 'phishing site' claims (though a different service - Microsoft's that is in IE7)
I assembled a lot of info about the problems and put up a quick website, and got it published in a high-traffic webmaster news site, but when nobody bothered reading it I stopped publishing more information on the threat.
I think that for most webmasters it is a case of not caring until they get badly burnt, personally.
One of the more reprehensible examples I saw was found by Matt Cutts last month (though he didn't know the source of the info) that in my opinion is the modern equivalent of a protection racket.
Matt noted that his site was listed as 'evil' and the reason that his and others is listed is that they do not pay money to 'site seal' partners of the supposed anti-phishing service involved.
I would happily pick up the site I setup again, but seriously I need more interest than the 2 people out of thousands that I got previously.
I did have a solution in the works to cope with all these 'anti-phishing' services, but I kind of deep-sixed it when nobody was interested in the problem itself. (as it is it is just going to by my solution instead - because I need to protect my income)
I hope that greater coverage will at least wake webmasters up. This new anti-phishing war will do a LOT more damage that the SPAM war ever did.
https://phishedout.com/
Cheers, Mathew
Interesting site, Mathew. This all reminds me of those "it's for your own good" comments that adults give kids. We're being protected to the point of harm online, just like it would have been better to let me fall out of that tree when I was 7, just to teach me a lesson.
This is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
is this really true? that would be way over the line.
Does anyone have a workaround yet for those of us who prefer not to install McAfee? I sense a FF Addon coming.
Egol - I've seen some sites given a black mark because they allegedly send out one email a week. But two of our sites got pinged for emails when we have never sent an email from either of them.
Those two sites also got a black mark because we had one link on each site to another site they didn't like.
When I first saw this months ago I thought that it might have been something positive but now it's just a case of shoot first and never bother asking questions - ever. And if there is anything positive in that attitude I'm yet to see it.
They don't even seem to understand that email addresses can be spoofed and yet they have set themselves up as some sort of authority on websites?
In our experience it was impossible to even contact Site Advisor to plead or case or tell them that we had removed the offending links.
But then what can you expect from something run by McAffee - their other software is basically crap too.
This may well rank in the tops for comments made in... well, just about any year! ;)
Wow.... gotta be very careful how you word things. lol
I noticed this after I upgraded my McAfee software, too. While I'm not into surfing for potentially dangerous content (promise!), the checks, exclamations and crosses do help when you've searched for something that spammers are potentially into. Something like song lyrics usually comes up with some red sites.
I've run into the question mark more frequently, though, and it usually puts me off clicking through. This raises the issue of the SiteAdvisor misrepresenting sites or lowering sites' traffic unfairly. My question is: if a site has received a warning icon and they genuinely don't deserve it, can they contact McAfee with a correction request? If this isn't possible, McAfee might run into trouble from angry webmasters...
Good question, I can see the legal implications if they do not allow you rebuff your warning icon. Trying to activate this feature now (to check my sites), btw does this only work in IE (7)?
edit: Sorry I am dumb, installs as an extension to FFox
No, it was working with IE 6 for me at home before I downloaded 7... we don't use the McAfee software at the office, but I can only imagine it works with Firefox, etc.
re: edit: :)
My sites all have green checks. But, if you click through to the report for some of my sites, it says "no problems". I'd like to know what I need to do to be labeled "Safe Site". But could find no documentation or instructions. I've passed the security reviews for some strict programs... what more must I do?