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He's taking no prisoners and you're on his hit list
Life seems set to get a whole lot harder for webmasters as some self-appointed Sheriff's attempt to try and clean up the Net. Of course, in the spirit of the Wild West these guys shoot first and don't even bother to ask questions afterwards.

But then why should they bother asking questions, everybody knows these are the good guys of the Web and they would never ever give anyone the wrong information -(pardon me while I go somewhere quiet to vomit). So people are going to believe them and that's going to make it a whole lot harder for you and me.

Sheriff Google
One of these self-appointed Sheriffs is Google itself and the latest victim to get shot down was pussy.org. That's a site that has ranked in the top spot for ‘pussy' for at least 6 years now and that ranking has reportedly given it around 140,000 visitors every day.

Google didn't take away their number one spot in the search engine results pages; instead they just routed all the clicks on the site through an interstitial page. That's a page that pops up with a warning that, in this case, said:

Warning - the site you are about to visit may harm your computer

Surfers who wanted to go to pussy.org were then told that they could learn more about malware and how to protect themselves at stopbadware.org. They were also given two suggestions; one was to return to the previous search page and pick another result and the second was to try another search.

After reading all that the surfers could continue on to pussy.org but how many people would really do that after seeing a warning from the mighty Google?

Evidently not many because the traffic to pussy.org certainly dropped enough to sound some alarm bells and now the people behind the site are trying to get that interstitial page removed.

They claim that they have never had any malware on their site and they have no idea why Google would think they did. And just to make matters even more interesting one guy who went to stopbadware.org and checked on 50 sites that were listed there never got that interstitial page when he went back to Google and followed the SERP trail to each of the 50 sites.

So what are we seeing here? Definite malware sites do not warrant that nasty interstitial page but sites that may have been fingered unfairly do?

There's nothing quite like the Internet for a lack of uniformity and fairness ... especially where Google is concerned.

Sheriff McAfee
However Google is not the only Sheriff out there. McAfee Site Advisor is also out there wearing the badge and shooting down baddies left and right. If you haven't come across McAfee Site Advisor then do a search for it and install it because you will need it to see what they think of your sites.

Once it's installed you will see a colored bar appear in your browser window and the color of that bar will vary depending on whether or not McAfee thinks your site is good, bad or really very very bad. If it really doesn't like your site then that colored bar turns a bright red.

Steve and I have two sites that we know of that McAfee suggests are really really bad and that trigger the red warning bar. One of the reasons McAfee triggers that warning bar is because one of the old links on the site redirected to a dialer and we have now removed that link.

The other reason the red bar was triggered was because we have allegedly sent out spam emails from the domain. Interestingly we have never sent out any emails from either of those two domains. Quite likely what has happened is that someone has spoofed those domains in their spam emails and now we have been tagged and would never have known about it if Steve hadn't installed Site Advisor.

See? Shoot first and ask no questions later!

It's common knowledge ... even among surfers these days ... that email addresses can be easily spoofed but it seems that the people behind McAfee Site Advisor don't understand that. Instead all they see is a porn site so it must be guilty so let's shoot them down with a red tag.

Nice one McAfee ... it does a lot for your credibility. But then you've got the star on your chest so you don't have to worry about credibility do you?

Now don't get me wrong; I'm all for sites like McAfee Site Advisor and I see no problems with Google and their interstitial pages ... just so long as they get things right.

What they are doing is impacting on the livelihoods of ordinary people and so getting it right 50% of the time ... or even 90% of the time ... simply isn't good enough. These guys, if they want to be the protectors of the innocent masses, have to get it right 100% of the time and if they don't then they're no better than the scum they're trying to protect people from.

In the real world if the Sheriff gets it wrong and you end up in prison then you're entitled to compensation. I wonder how long it will be before we see someone seeking compensation from Google or McAfee Site Advisor because they got it wrong.