Google is now serving a big red warning to searchers before they go to websites with deceptive download buttons.
Google announced they are now blocking searchers from accessing web sites that contain deceptive download buttons. They will show a big red warning after the user clicks on the search result that warns “deceptive site ahead.”
Here is a screen shot of the warning that the searcher may see before trying to access such a site:
Google said, “We’re expanding Safe Browsing protection to protect you from such deceptive embedded content, like social engineering ads.”
These deceptive ads are defined by Google as those that:
- pretend to act, or look and feel, like a trusted entity — like your own device or browser, or the website itself
- try to trick you into doing something you’d only do for a trusted entity — like sharing a password or calling tech support
Here are some examples of these deceptive ads:
Reference from - searchengineland.com
Google’s manual action penalty this weekend was over free product reviews
The mass Google manual actions for outbound links was related to the warning Google gave a few weeks ago around bloggers giving links in exchange for free products or services.
Yesterday, we reported that Google sent out outbound linking penalties to a mass number of webmasters over the weekend. It turned out that this was directly related to the warning from Google a few weeks ago for bloggers to disclose free product reviews as such and nofollow links in their blog posts over these product reviews.
Google told bloggers to “nofollow the link, if you decide to link to the company’s site, the company’s social media accounts, an online merchant’s page that sells the product, a review service’s page featuring reviews of the product or the company’s mobile app in an app store.”
Well, now that the warning was communicated, a few weeks later, in typical Google style, Google actually sent out manual actions for those who did not comply with those guidelines.
John Mueller from Google commented in a few threads in the Google support forums telling people to look at the warning Google published a few weeks ago named Best practices for bloggers reviewing free products they receive from companies. He added:
In particular, if a post was made because of a free product (or free service, or just paid, etc.), then any links placed there because of that need to have a rel=nofollow attached to them. This includes links to the product itself, any sales pages (such as on Amazon), affiliate links, social media profiles, etc. that are associated with that post. Additionally, I imagine your readers would also appreciate it if those posts were labeled appropriately. It’s fine to keep these kinds of posts up, sometimes there’s a lot of useful information in them! However, the links in those posts specifically need to be modified so that they don’t pass PageRank (by using the rel=nofollow).Once these links are cleaned up appropriately, feel free to submit a reconsideration request, so that the webspam team can double-check and remove the manual action.
John Mueller actually commented a few times. This is just one of those comments.
