As I started my Monday morning, sipping on coffee, listening to this really cool playlist I made on Spotify while mulling over how to help push one of my keywords to a long eluding rank. A few ideas suddenly clicked, I finally had the changes that would finally help get that breakthrough. I implemented those changes and quickly went to google search console to index my page. But what I saw instead really set me back, all the freshness and hope silently fading away for a moment.
What was the issue all about?
I saw a red caution warning on the page stating, 1 issue detected. The message said:
"Google has detected harmful content on some of your site’s pages. We recommend that you remove it as soon as possible. Until then, browsers such as Google Chrome will display a warning when users visit or download certain files from your site."
Apparently there was some harmful content on my website, which I had no clue about, and the users would receive a warning before they visit my page. Wondering what that meant, the first thing I did was to hope that google would help me out on this.
Why did it occur in the first place?
So I went on to google the warning, “1 issue detected, uncommon download”. I wasn’t the first one and a lot of people around had faced the same issue and lived through it. What I found from all these brilliant people on the forums was that every once in a while Google Search Console might throw a warning or an issue at you.
At times these issues can be serious and need to be addressed or at other times you can just ask for a review and the issue would be gone in some time.
As I browsed through different search results I found that every once in awhile Google Search Console might throw a warning or an issue in front of you. These issues can be serious and need to be addressed as it would directly affect the page visits as the viewer gets a message that this page contains harmful content. So this was something which I couldn’t just let go.
One important thing I figured out while researching the issue was that If Googlebot, google’s crawler, faces a problem while trying to crawl your sitepage, it’s going to give up and move on. This means that your sitepage would not be visible to searchers as it won’t be indexed.
Additionally, it occurs as Google Safe Browsing, which identifies unsafe websites across the web, finds a new binary or a downloadable file, so it warns us with uncommonly downloaded and could be dangerous.
What I did to resolve the issue?
In such cases, the warning gets lifted automatically, when Google Safe Browsing sees the download file as harmless. You can choose to either do nothing or request a review on Google Search Console. This warning will stop showing in either event.
Any downloadable files are considered to be as a malware, so any warnings associated with the file is automatically removed when Google Safe Browsing considers the file to be harmless.
I found this cool article and it gave me further insights into how Google safe browsing deals with malware.
Now that I finally sorted out this issue I could finally go on to index my page. *Spoiler alert* Those changes didn’t really give me the breakthrough I was hoping for. But at least now I’ve got one less problem to think about.
After 6 Months, Another Google Search Console Issue came.
On April 18, Raj forwarded an email of an issue detected by Google Search Console.
This time the issue was different.
What was that Issue?
The message on that email was this:
Social engineering content detected
Google’s Safe Browsing systems have detected that some pages on your site might be hacked or might include third party resources such as ads that are designed to trick users into installing malicious software or giving up sensitive information. To protect your site’s visitors, affected pages have been demoted in Google’s search results, and browsers such as Google Chrome now display a warning when users visit your site. You can see which pages might be affected in the Security Issues report.
Why did this issue come up?
Well, honestly I even don't know the answer because when we clicked on "View Pages" there were not any pages that were containing any third party resources such as ads.
How did I solve this?
Since Google Search Console was not showing any page in the issue so I thought that requesting review could solve this issue.
Hence, I clicked on the "Request review" button.
And Yes! after 2 days the issue got solved.
Well, some of the google search console issues automatically get resolved or require a click on request review button. And above 2 were examples of those.
But don't worry! it's not the end, I promise whatever search console issues I will face in future, I will keep updating them on this blog.
Till then goodbye.
