As I visited the Google Webmaster Help forums, like I do a few times a day, I noticed a huge number of complaints from webmasters that Google has added the "this site may be hacked" warning to tons of sites. There are dozens and dozens of complaints in the forums from webmasters about this.
Here is what the warning looks like to searchers:
After collecting 15 threads of complaints, I decided to stop, but here are the ones I collected; thread 1, thread 2, thread 3, thread 4, thread 5, thread 6, thread 7, thread 8, thread 9, thread 10, thread 11, thread 12, thread 13, thread 14, and thread 15.
Many of the sites complaining are in the adult business but not all. There are some sites in the affiliate space, some in credit card sales, some publisher sites and more.
I am not sure if this is a bug with Google's hacked classifier or if there is a commonality between all these sites, such as they are all using the same CMS, which has a major security flaw that was exposed and thus they are all hacked?
I did ask Google's John Mueller about this and have not yet heard back on the issue.
There was a time where Google sent mass hacked notifications to webmasters, maybe this is another case.
It is weird timing with Google posted about hacked sites case studies on their blog last night.
Forum discussion all over Google Webmaster Help.
Update: Turns out this is a bug on Google's end, they sent me the following 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.
