Google’s combat against malicious sites seems to have reached a level where legitimate sites are also getting affected, if their webmaster forums are any indication. More and more sites are incorrectly being marked as spam/phishing/malware by Google’s bots.
In my case, my site was still under development when it happened. I was the only one visiting my site as I was developing and testing it. I was testing e-mail notifications for different user actions by sending them to my own gmail e-mail addresses. The e-mails accidentally had just the right words to trigger Google’s phishing sensors and they immediately flagged the site linked in the e-mails as a phishing site, and they added a scary red page when I visited it next time using Chrome! It took just 6-8 false-positive e-mails for this to happen, and I know for certain that nobody reported the e-mails because they were sent to myself. The problem is that their review mechanism for appeals is automated too, so you can’t talk to anyone. Their bots denied my review twice.
The issue was finally resolved when I contacted the Gmail support team from the account using which I was sending the notifications and told them that they mistakenly flagged my genuine e-mails as phishing. Then they cleared the site. But by then, 000webhost also blocked the site automatically due to their integration with SiftScience. I explained everything to them yesterday and I’m waiting for them to get back to me. Meanwhile I’ve lost so many hours on this issue and my site is still down!
Just a word of caution to everyone else.
