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Not again! Google Safebrowsing / Phishing (26)

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Did anyone of you see an increase in landing pages being blocked by Google Safebrowsing for Phishing?

While the last few months were relatively quiet for me, I now got 4 such warnings during the past 7 days, which is quite stressful for me. I'm not doing phishing obviously, I'm just running a rather crappy landing page. I even changed the header color and removed the icons plus I removed the "social proof" comments (so that it doesn't resemble to Facebook anymore at all) half a year ago, even though this increased my CPA (but decreased my physical stress level).

I'm running pops on different traffic sources and use two different webhosting companies plus I use different tracking domains.
So far, the 4 safebrowsing warnings were:
- for 4 different LP domains
- on 3 different traffic sources
- on 2 different webhosting providers
- 2 for mobile, 2 for desktop campaigns
- for LPs using 3 different tracking domains

So I cannot see a pattern and I fear that these blockings will continue, forcing me to change domains etc.

As I don't see a pattern, my guess is that this is related to the Chrome 65 update.

The only things that Google could dislike on my LPs are
- welcome popup
- backbutton redirect
- the offer (gaming)

So it's either this, or it's some kind of user behaviour that triggers the warnings.

I'm wondering:
- did you also see an increase of those warnings recently?
- what could I do against it (besides manually changing LP domains)?

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Personally I don't have a lot of experience with this issue - I don't get domains banned and I think it's because my lander domains share the same dedicated IP as an authority site of mine.

A couple things you could try:

1)Make sure you're not sharing an IP with lots of other people (i.e. shared hosting) - living in a "bad neighborhood" can make your lander site more proned to being associated with shady sites (although by running antivirus landers it may be the other way around, but still a worthy thing to try).

2)Instead of getting new domains, get expired domains from expireddomains.net or similar. Coincidentally I mentioned it in another post earlier today:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post339657

Hopefully that will decrease the frequency of the bans.

Switching to a new domain should be a 2-minute job though (basically: point from domain registrar to nameservers, set up alias for CDN to new domain, add new DNS records at DNS provider for new domain). And domains are so cheap these days that cost shouldn't be an issue.



Amy

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@osmiumman

I just got my first one today.
Had one traffic source reject a campaign I'd been running - then found out that Google had said my page was 'Phishing'

I'm going to setup a process to
[1] Change domains quickly
[2] Have a backup domain ready
[3] Manually check domains once a day to make sure google still likes them

I was wondering if in your research
- You'd found out how this is happening (are people reporting the sites or is google using some type of bot to look at pages)
- Do you know any way to get automatically notified if your site is on google's unsafe list?
* Would rather swap domains asap so do not get on the bad side of traffic sources.
- Did you find you had a decrease in conversion rate from Mobile Chrome browsers (or other browsers) since they showed phishing warning?

thanks - Suneel

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BTW - does anyone know if really bad traffic sources can get your domain flagged by google for phishing?

I was testing out ZeroPark about the same time my domain got flagged.
There was seriously a LOT of bad placements I was cutting at the time (bot traffic, stupidly high landing page ctr etc)
So wondering if that could have caused it?

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The other day a direct link campaign of mine from ZeroPark was rejected because it was flagged by Google as having malware. After thoroughly checking the offer, I found out that the malware was from one of the redirects of a Mobidea offer. What affiliate network are you using? Maybe you want to check out the redirects of your offer. Not sure if there is any correlation though with your domain.

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Yeah, just got my domain flagged too... I think it was possibly the monetizer/afflow redirect links - need to check and confirm.

The offers they send you to are pretty shady sometimes - stuff you would need to cloak otherwise..,

On the other hand, there are elements to pop landers which ARE pretty misleading this is true... but all landers are misleading.... so wtf! Why pick on the pop pushers?! Screw google

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Happened to me too...3 times..all on my amazon S3 landers.

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I woulnd't blame Amazon S3 for it; it happened to me also on a VPS server.

The offer is not the problem for me, so I'm still wondering if this increase in warnings has to do with Chrome 65 or if there's something to fix on my landing pages to reduce the amount of warnings.

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I had the same issue before,
I change ip
I change domain name
Perfect solution, block any ip working with isp hosting redirect it to safe page

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Thank you Hagolo

Could you maybe give us a few more hints on this?

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Hi hagolo! Thanks for the tips!

The frequent bans seemed to have started recently - did you try this method recently? Would be great if you did!

I'm just wondering how long a new IP would last before getting banned again. If I remember correctly, every time I asked for a new IP from my webhost, I had to justify with a reason.

So I'm thinking that if new IPs also get banned frequently, that it may not be the best solution.

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide on this!



Amy

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I don´t think IP bans are the problem.
If you use shared hosting and they would flag an IP then in worst case many innocent users that share the IP with you would also be affected.
And blocking server/hosting IPs will only work to a certain level and is by far no perfect solution.
When you blacklist then all needed to get through the block is to get a new IP that is not on your blacklist.
What you could do is to whitelist only residential ISPs for example.
That would prevent that a new IP would be enough to get around of your block.
I do it that way for several years already, problem is that it won´t work for all Geos because some Geos like USA just have too many different ISPs.
In theory it will work there as well but will take more time to set it up.

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I used Propellerads, popads, popcash as traffic source and my domain got the same issue. My shared hosting is from 1&1. So should I change it to new domain name and buy a new ip from 1&1.

Any specific procedure to follow?

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Is the reason for doing that, to keep google from accessing the page? Sorry as tech really isn't my strong area.

And how would you whitelist them? By whitelisting all IP ranges for the ISPs?



Amy

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Seeing traffic coming from UpWork on my landing page yesterday, I noticed that someone posted for copy my landing page (just need to take the source code, it's html ...) ahah


I modified the landing folder and did some research on google with my domains, I found that many people were testing my links and I also found a landing marked for phishing by google. I also modify the folder and this morning all the domain is flagged..


Dating landing pages, first time in 5 years with this vertical. The offer is not a problem so I think Google is getting a bit sensitive

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Not only Google, other things as well.
Several years ago I needed a solution where only real users will be able to arrive my sites, no companies, no reviewers.
Then in 2010 I started coding my own cloaker with blocking only specific IPs.
Then I improved it step by step, instead of blocking single IPS I started blocking the IP ranges of these IPs.
That still was not good enough for the reasons I posted above.
Besides some other checks I then used ISP/ORG whitelisting instead of IP or IP range blacklisting.
That way I have more control over who can access my sites.
With that cloaker I never had any problems and never lost accounts.

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Nice! So perhaps using a commercial cloaker that cloaks from google could be a potential solution? Because there are people like myself that can't code to save our lives.



Amy

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Well, I just got flagged yesterday too. No funny business in my landers except backfix (non-JS) and intro pops.

I was using a subdomain that even a blank html page would trigger the warning.

I simply created a new subdomain, and in under 5 minute everything was rolling again. All my other subdomains under the TLD were fine

Seems google has a new type of crawler

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Yes, could be a potential solution.
Not more, not less.
Last year I wanted to test Adwords again after long time and used fraudfilter.io for it and my account got banned.
So commercial cloakers can work but not always.
I don´t want to put the blame on Fraudfilter, it´s also possible that my configuration was not setup properly.
But as far as I know Adwords is hard to cloak nowadays anyway.
My personal cloaker I only used for other platforms the last years.

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If you're using a) copyrighted material ( think logos / like buttons, literally imitating authority sites ) or b) have aggressive scripts such as vibrate or sound or c) are using 'scareware' ( literally any antivirus lander an affiliate will use fits this category ) - the problems with domains getting flagged are increasing.

The more volume you run, the more likely crawlers are going to pick up the page. Users reporting the page as missleading is another factor, not protecting landing pages from repeat hits can be too - we've tested a lot from using different hosts, domain registrars, DNS providers, CDNs - the points above all cause pretty fast flagging if you run volume.

A quick solution to at least reduce the problem: stop imitating brands ( logos, even farb schemes ) and remove aggressive scripts starting at vibrate/sound ending at JS welcome/exit messages. Not saying this will solve the problem, but for sure it will reduce the frequency the LPs will get flagged.

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That's your solution right there then. I'm currently not playing this type of game but here's how I used to do it:
1) set up a wildcard * subdomain
2) in your tracker, set up your lander so the URL will automatically be a new/unique URL for each visit.

Here's how it would look in Funnelflux but I suppose the same can be done with other trackers:

https://{hit-id}.mylander.com

In addition it can also help keep a low profile on some spy tools since there's never more than 1 visit per unique URL. Good times.

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That is genius! I'm using FFlux, has this been working for you in Adwords? Do your account last long enough?

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Ingenius indeed!

Will refer other members to this method as well. Thank you both so much for sharing!

I haven't gotten lander domains banned yet (because I host mine with an authority site of mine), so not very familiar with how google bans work. Do these bans usually occur at the subdomain level of the domain level?

Just wondering how often adding a new subdomain would work.




Amy

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Really depends - if you're running into banning issues regularly, once a ban occurs it can easily overtake the whole toplevel domain - but the subdomain 'hack' will at least help in the beginning. If you're using an LP that's been flagged before, I found the ban happening on toplevel to kick in much sooner.

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just got flagged too. can we do this using Voluum?

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This might be a silly question, but why can't you just make the server check the referrer and the page parameters before serving the page?

If this is real click, then it will be coming from your tracker. You can then serve the real Landing Page.

If this is a Google bot or a human reviewer responding to a complaint, then they will have the referrer, and most likely the parameters, wrong. So your can send them something completely innocuous.

Admittedly, his does not work that easily with a CDN.

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