McAfee and Yahoo! are destroying my business

techpro · 05-07-08

The combination of McAfee SiteAdvisor and Yahoo! SafeSearch is destroying my business by publishing untrue danger warnings about mywebsite to all users of SiteAdvisor and Yahoo! Search. This could also be happening to you!

I am a software sales affiliate. Last week, McAfee Site Advisor scanned a file on my site that it falsely claimed to contain a virus. When I discovered this I scanned the file at virustotal.com and found that no other virus scanner (out of a total of 33) found anything wrong with it. It is what we technical types call a false positive. Nevertheless, McAfee is apparently publishing defamatory ratings of sites based just on the scan results of its own scanner. For more information than I have space to give here, see my blog posting.

Now Yahoo!, which has entered into a partnership with McAfee to provide the data for its new SearchSafe feature, is plastering these warnings over every search result that comes from my site, so they are seen not just by the relatively few who have installed the SiteAdvisor plugin but by every Yahoo! Search user in most of the developed world. See my blog entry which also shows what one of my search results now looks like.

This dangerous piece of software (SiteAdvisor) needs to be stopped or the next innocent victim whose business it destroys could be you! But what can I do?

fizzbird · 05-07-08

Unfortunately the likes of McAfee, Norton, et al have been making a good living by playing upon the paranoia of the general public.

If you can't beat 'em - join 'em!

edit/ judging by your links, it seems you already have

/ end edit

drivetowin · 06-07-08

You don't think by any chance it could be down to your xaddr service being used to send spam........my guess is that is not going to help your standing with yahoo either.

techpro · 06-07-08

Quote:

Originally Posted by drivetowin

You don't think by any chance it could be down to your xaddr service being used to send spam........my guess is that is not going to help your standing with yahoo either.

No, the SiteAdvisor rating page is quite specific about the reason for the danger rating.

And, for the record, the xaddr.com domain has not been used to send spam. Some affiliate has used xaddr.com to hide the address of their site and then put that address as a link in a spam email sent out from the usual gobbledygook freemail address.

drivetowin · 06-07-08

Fair enough - hadn't seen that page

By the way, when I click on the links in your first post I just get a white page with the message "Spam is not appreciated."

ChristopherB · 06-07-08

For the time being just remove spyware doctor, thats the reason it's being flagged i think i read on that website.

Dynamoo · 06-07-08

You're not the only site getting a negative rating for this, according to this Google search.

What you have here is a "false positive". McAfee aren't targetting you for this, but they are mis-detecting the software. You may find that you have rather more leverage if you talk to the software vendor about this as it will most likely be impacting many affiliates.

techpro · 07-07-08

Yes, I'm pretty familiar with anti-malware products and their operation, including the phenomenon of false positives, having carried out reviews of this type of product in the past and even been a consultant for Kaspersky years ago when they were starting up in the UK. I have found, and warned, a couple of other sites that had received the red flag because of this, but didn't think of Googling on the filename.

Yes, I could remove that product, but it is a good selling product for me. Is McAfee or Yahoo going to compensate me for the time taken and lost sales commissions? I don't think so.

I have contacted both RegNow and PC Tools but am still waiting for any action.

As for the "spam not appreciated" message on the links to my blog - how odd! The URL is correct but the message appears for me, too, if I click on the link from here. If I click the Go button again then the page opens normally. Must be some weird thing with the Pivot blog software I'm using.

Dynamoo · 07-07-08

Yeah I've seen that strange anti-spam thing on other blogs.

If you were talking about an anti-virus product coming up with a false detection, then you would usually see a fix for it in the next update. The problem is that SiteAdvisor isn't really an anti-virus product and from what I can see it appears to be running on autopilot.

Definitely get PC Tools involved though, do they have an affiliate manager who you can bend the ear of?