Tag Archives: live search

Malware Detection in Live Search and Webmaster Tools

Live Search has recently released some great new features that I want to highlight. The first is from the Webmaster center, which is the team I was hired on.

With the new Webmaster Tools, you can now see which pages on your site are infected with malware (aka drive-by downloads). The links are clearly highlighted and disabled so that you won’t accidentally click on them.

webmaster_crawl_issues

Not only that, but you can also see what pages that your site links to are infected with malware. This is great if your site allows any user-generated content and it’s possible that some link spam has made it on.

webmaster_outbound_links

In addition to these improvements in Webmaster Tools, the general Live Search engine is using the same malware detection to notify users of bad pages in the general search results. To see this, click on the link as if to visit it and you’ll get a pop-up instead.

livesearch_malware

If you run your own site, get signed up in Webmaster Tools and make sure you’re not contributing to the malware problem. If you do find that your site has malware on it, once you’ve removed it you can request that your site be reanalyzed.

For more info, check out these other blogs and articles:

Diagnosing SEO issues with Live Search Webmaster Tools

The folks on my future team at Microsoft have released a presentation about the diagnosing search engine issues with the recently released Live Search Webmaster Tools (it was out before, but in beta).

If you run a web-site, you should check out the tools and the presentation (even without narration, it’s worth a look).