HACKER Q&A
📣 lampshades

Is Google blocking a large part of the internet?


I'm working on a new website and it has some marketing on the landing page. The product hasn't launched, but I want people to be able to sign up to a newsletter to find out more information.

I create projects here and there every other year or so, but I've never seen a Deceptive Site Warning put on any of them. Not only did I get this when I went to my site initially, I got it again when I clicked a link, in Safari.

I apparently have to verify my domain so that it's registered with Google before anyone can freely visit it.

What are your thoughts? Maybe I'm overreacting.


  👤 THENATHE Accepted Answer ✓
I’ve found a lot of the violations come from seemingly nowhere, and I want to think that clients in some way support the actual “scan” of the website so that in some way if you visit the domain many times when there is an SSL error or mismatch, and there are downloads that are not malicious, those two factors together make google think something is phishy. I don’t know hardly anything about cybersecurity (that part of my career is under trained and usually passed off to a dedicated person), but I have a lot of anecdotal evidence from occurrences of what seems to be that

👤 usernew
Pretty much every browser has a blacklist of websites, so no it's not google. The blacklists are a best-effort, and get a lot of false positives which end up pushing smaller websites not only off search results, but now "off the internet" for the majority of people who don't know better.

Of course technical people all turn this stuff off in the browser, but the issue is the browser's target audience is the woman selling tamales from a cart outside the DMV, and the 20-something who does his taxes on his phone.

Much like with email, we now have to jump through many hoops with these gatekeepers, if we want to be able to reach that tamale lady with our content. Unfortunately, the solution in place now is the only one I can think of. The other option is thousands of bad actors infecting millions of devices with botnets and stealing gramma's banking passwords.


👤 soared
What is the url? There is a lot of documentation on warnings like that and from my experience aren't used without reason.

Did you purchase the domain from a reseller, was there content on it previously, and/or is it possible to misunderstand the meaning of the domain name?



👤 Giorgi
if by "large part" you mean all the pr0n and all the piracy then - Yes, those are filtered out and what you see is sterilized SEO garbage.