I want to apologize to anyone who visited my site in the wee hours of the morning and got a malware warning. An ad network which we are a part of, IZEA Media, announced today that one of their advertising publishers was serving malware, which caused all of us in their network to be flagged – click here to read their explanation. Many blogs were affected so you have probably noticed this issue several times today if you are blog-hopping! Jai and I were up all night working on the problem and the IZEA ads have been removed. Google has flagged our site as A-OK and clean again, but please be aware that it takes some time for this change to propagate, so you may still notice a cached warning next to our site in Google search results.
Ugh. Thanks for pointing this out. I had a few people mention this to me last week! And I noticed it myself today. So IZEA’s to blame. Have they removed that ad? Are they doing anything to us publishers who’ve been hurt by this?
They said they were working with Google to identify and remove the site serving the malware – I just checked and there was a new update from Ted Murphy citing a “Partner network”:
http://socialspark.com/taking-out-malware-warnings/
I have heard rumblings from people in other ad networks that they are having this problem as well, so it actually makes sense to me that there could be one ad served across multiple networks with malware. What you can do in the meantime is remove IZEA ads and submit your site via Google Webmaster Tools for review. Once they look it over and see that there is no malware being linked to, then they will remove the warning, although it will stay cached in search results for a while.