May 08 2008

Does your site get a tick or a cross?

A new feature in anti-virus software and on search engines may have negative effects on your businesses web credibility, but you won't know until it's too late.

I've been looking at some new anti-virus tools recently – yup some people have all of the best jobs, unfortunately it's not me – and it's highlighted a growing trend that has yet to cause a major problem, but could be a serious issue for some sites.

Search has become central to business and a top place natural-search listing is what we all aspire too, and it’s also what the search engine users have grown to trust. But what if your hard-won natural listing had a big red sticker next to it, that effectively says by clicking here you’re putting your computer in danger, or a green tick and a pop-up box saying “this site is safe to click on”. Well that’s what’s starting to happen. A new feature of anti-virus manufacturer AVG that affects searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN and the new built-in McAfee SearchScan Feature on Yahoo Search warns users about “dangerous sites” before they click on them. With AVG you either get a green tick if the site is “ok” or a yellow exclamation mark, or you get a red cross if the site is “dangerous.” Which not only puts the user off clicking through, but also ruins every penny you've spent on brand awareness stone dead.

Now we don’t object to users being warned away from potentially dangerous sites however what does worry us is the definitions of “dangerous” or as Yahoo and McAfee put them “risky.”

Here's what Yahoo defines as “risky”; “sites with security concerns such as spyware, adware and other malicious software that can infect and damage a user's PC. SearchScan also identifies sites that have shown bad email practices, flooding users' In-boxes with spam emails.”

Now to my mind, that's going to mean there's a hell of a lot of potentially risky sites. It only takes a few emails to be bounced back by some newbie AOL users and all of a sudden your whole site is off-limits to the entire web population and bang go the sales figures.

What do you think? How about a SearchScan feature that stops dodgy users clicking on your site? Have Yahoo gone too far?

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)