This post contains affiliate links.
So on late Thursday night / Friday morning last week like many bloggers I woke up to Malware warning errors on my site. This was reported to me by the 48+ notifications on Facebook by followers and fans and I saw that many of my blogs all had the same issue.
At first the error was misleading, and after routinely scanning my site I found no malware at all on it from virustotal.com and urlvoid.com so I was doing further digging and discovered on SocialSpark there was a blog post about malware being related to the IZEA Media service.
Well this was related to an advertiser network that purchased ads through IZEA Media that led to a malware site, and all sites that displayed the ads were flagged by Google Safesearch and had this malware warning that would show up if a user visited the site via search or directly with the Google Chrome browser.
To remove the malware warning you had to remove the IZEA Media code and then file a reconsideration request in Google Web Master tools, but it was faster once I filed a request on stopbadware.org which seemed to lead to a resolution 12 hours later.
3 days later IZEA Staree still shows the malware issue, and I would refrain from putting the IZEA Media ads back on your blog until IZEA has the issue completely resolved, since linking to Staree (which their ads do show on IZEA Media) could lead to your own blog showing malware warnings again.
Hopefully IZEA will get this issue fully resolved soon, and I think this was an isolated incident. I have seen this happen before with an advertiser who purchased an ad through BuySellAds.com on my site and had to manually have it removed, but haven’t seen anything like this happen on a mass scale before. IZEA still offers excellence service for bloggers and this mishap was caused by an advertiser network leveraging purchasing ads through their system, this opportunity should lead them to having better manual review processes put in place but overall does not personally make me have a negative opinion of the service as they provide too many good opportunities for bloggers and this one hiccup shouldn’t be a deterrent from bloggers wanting to leverage their services to earn some money for their blogging efforts.
-Justin Germino
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