Your Site May Harm Your Computer? Get That Google Label Removed In Hours

Jan 23, 2009 - 6:37 am 25 by

Google will label sites in their search results as harmful, when the site is believed to have malware on it. The last thing Google wants to do, is help an unsuspecting searcher land on a web page that can infect your computer. So Google takes a proactive approach to discovery and labeling malware results.

But sometimes, your site can be found to have malware. Malware can get on your site through being hacked or through third party code. If you find this label on your site, you need to remove the malware from your site and notify Google that it has been removed.

After it is removed, go to Google Webmaster Tools and there will be a place to request a review. Go through that process and then hopefully, within a few hours, that label will be removed.

Google has a detailed post on this at the Webmaster Central Blog. That post and in a recent thread at Google Webmaster Help, it says, it typically takes hours to remove the label, but can take as much as a day.

Webmasters are eager to have a Google malware label removed from their site and often ask how long a review of the site will take. Both the original scanning and the review process are fully automated. The systems analyze large portions of the internet, which is big place, so the review may not happen immediately. Ideally, the label will be removed within a few hours. At its longest, the process should take a day or so.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Google Search Volatility

More Details

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 13, 2026

Jul 13, 2026 - 10:00 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Email Support Broke

Jul 13, 2026 - 9:45 am
Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Volatility Around 7-Eleven

Jul 13, 2026 - 9:25 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Reaffirms Include Canonical On Canonical Page Itself

Jul 13, 2026 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Previews For Assets, Text Customizations & Final URL Expansion

Jul 13, 2026 - 7:41 am
Bing SEO

Bing: We Do Not Do One Off Indexing / Ranking Penalties, It's Not Scalable

Jul 13, 2026 - 7:31 am
 
Previous Story: How To Use Google To Recover a Lost Web Site