Care: Using Direct Download Links

[Simmo!]

I was searching Yahoo and noticed Dom's C&G site came up with a warning in the SERPS about potentially damaging downloads. I just chatted with her and it's a story she may well share, but the upshot of it is if you are using Direct Download links you may find MacAfee's SiteAdvisor trips over it and sends a warning to Yahoo, which in turn flags your site as potentially harmful.

In Dom's case, she had several DD links on a page and it was the Phoenician one that bought up the "red" flag, although some others bough up a "yellow" one too.

Worth noting.

Simmo!

[Engineer]

Interesting -- thanks for the info.

Any idea how long the site will remain flagged? How long has it been this way?

I wonder if this would happen if you masked the links with a redirect script. i.e. does Yahoo look only at the HTML on a page, and does it compare the content to a list of known dangerous URLS (in this case the casino download links)? Or does Yahoo actually follow the links? (If the links are followed and then a determination is made, masking the links would be in vain.)

I know that if you include certain casino links within email copy, the emails will be filtered to the spam folder. But if you mask the links with a redirect, the emails make it through to the Inbox.

I wonder if the same principle applies to the Yahoo flagging system?

[dominique]

It's G&C (GamesandCasino ) :p .

And I am madder than heck about it.

I had a download page and siteadvisor redflagged me.

I removed the entire page. All downloads gone.

Several months later I was still red flagged. I had communicated with them several times and they said just that I would be rescanned.

So site advisor is owned by macafee and macafee offers "Macafee Secure", a service that scans your site daily and certifies that there is no security risk whatsoever when people use your site. It costs a bunch of money. I called them up and was told that if I subscribed it would take care of the red flag.

So I paid up. I am being scanned daily and come up clean as a whistle.

However, macafee will not display the secure seal until siteadvisor removes the red flag. And siteadvisor refuses to remove it and displays false info about my site here:

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/gamesandcasino.com

The items they cite have not existed in many months.

Now Yahoo subscribed to siteadvisor and I am screwed, I get a lot of my traffic from Yahoo.

What a freaking scam!!!

Yahoo just refers you to siteadvisor, yahoo has nothing to do with it, they just subscribe to the service.

Macafee takes your money with false promises of making one of it's subdivisions concur with the findings of the daily macafee scans.

What a racket! I am thoroughly pissed.