Google’s new Hacked Site Classifier feature was meant to help end-users avoid websites that had been compromised by malicious hackers.
Unfortunately, the new feature is riddled with bugs that are mis-classifying clean sites with the hacked label. Headaches, as you might imagine, are in order for anyone unlucky enough to be hit by this bug.
Though Google has acknowledged the problem and provided options for victims of the bug to report the error, there’s still no real word on what exactly caused the problem.
The only word, so far, from the company came in the form of this (fairly generic) statement:
We’re slowly rolling out a new hacked page classifier (not CMS specific) and noticed a small number of misclassifications. We’re sorry for any trouble this may have caused — we are working on addressing the issues.
Shortly after the bug emerged, Google stepped up and offered an online reporting form where site owners could question their hacked status.
So far there’s no word on how soon a fix might be available for sites impacted by the bug.
One thing that is certain, it’s highly unlikely that organic traffic will be coming in from search results that label pages as victims of hackers.