Google Incorrectly Flags EasyWP Websites, Once Again
In January, the EasyWP team decided to call out Google on a serious issue that affected thousands of EasyWP customers who were hosting legitimate content on their respective websites. Unfortunately, this issue still hasn’t been solved.
Google, once again, has decided to overstep the market and its remit, delivering a poor experience for customers who use Google Chrome. (While we sort things out, we suggest using Firefox or an alternative browser as your default browser choice.)
Why are we posting this blog, you may ask? We’re doing it to shed light on the damage that Google is capable of doing and is currently doing. Not to mention they have yet to respond to our outreach requests.
Free Subdomains on EasyWP
Any EasyWP customer can choose to host their website on a custom domain name (e.g.mydomain.tld) or to use a free subdomain provided by us (e.g. ingress-alpha.easywp.com):
example-12345.ingress-alpha.easywp.com
EasyWP offers this free subdomain as a solution for customers who have not yet decided on their final domain name or for those who need a temporary solution to host their WordPress website, which doesn’t require a custom domain name.
In terms of this ongoing issue with Google, only customers who host subdomains with EasyWP are affected, not those who host custom domain names.
How Google Flagged EasyWP
Last week, Google flagged one of our customer’s subdomains as being infected with malware.
To be fair, this is something that can happen. Customers can use outdated plugins and/or themes, as well as scripts with vulnerable security. Usually, however, this is not a huge deal. In order to solve the problem, all it requires is a minor cleanup of the website and an update to all respective plugins and themes. The real issue started, however, when Google, instead of only flagging that particular website they thought was compromised, decided to flag all of EasyWP customers’ websites hosted on similar subdomains, even if they weren’t compromised in any way.
Here’s what a website looks like when it’s flagged by Google Chrome:
Pretty scary, isn’t it?
What Can EasyWP Website Owners and Google Do?
As an EasyWP website owner, try not to stress. We never host and never support any malicious online content or activity.
Shortly after our customer reported this incident to us, the subdomain in question was fixed. (Again, custom domain names were not affected.)
If your website happens to be hosted on a subdomain such as “.ingress-alpha.easywp.com”, your website could very well display a similar warning when using Google Chrome. In an effort to stay transparent, we’ve already requested a review from Google and will keep doing so whenever this happens.
Now, let’s talk about Google. Our request is simple. We asked (and ask) that you reconsider your strategy of flagging customer websites that don’t host any malicious content, whatsoever.
As we’re sure you’re aware, a penalty from the all-powerful Google is critical for a small business owner. This can severely affect their website traffic and hinder profit, not to mention their trust and reliability.
And, as a reputable hosting provider with thousands of customers worldwide, we at EasyWP hoped that Google would have the decency to respond to our request with real-time support.
Our only option so far? To simply fill in a form (see below), with no approximate timeline over when the problem will be fixed or even how it will be fixed.
Suffice to say, we’ve filled in this form numerous times for our customers. And we’re tired of it.
Keep in mind that our valued customers run important businesses and projects on their websites. When Google decides to mark their websites as malicious, even if it’s just for a few days, this has a detrimental effect, often killing it slowly.
At EasyWP, we’ll continue to fight the good fight and we’ll keep you posted on the current situation via Twitter.
As always, you can reach out to our 24/7 Customer Support Team in case you have any further questions. Don’t worry, you’ll get a real-time response from us.
We’re hopeful there’s a solution on the horizon but we recognize it’s not going to happen overnight. Stay tuned and thanks again for your patience during this time.
