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ascend-marketin
Former Member
Message 1 of 19

Our site has been flagged incorrectly

Siteadvisor has flagged our site with the following claim: "McAfee TrustedSource web reputation analysis found potential suspicious  behavior on this site which may pose a security risk. Use with caution.".  Siteadvisor does not even indicate why they have flagged our site. You will see in the report that there is no details given.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ascend-marketing.com

I have submited several dispute claims. I have even called McAfee technical support and they would not tell us why our site has been flagged. The representative said the only thing we can do is fill out a dispute claim and they would look into it. They said it would take 4-6 weeks to get a response.  This is not acceptable.  Anyone visiting our site (and using SiteAdvisor) is going to be alarmed when they see this bogus flag McAfee has placed upon our site.

If you're going to question a site's credibilty, at least provide some information to support your claim. Otherwise, it's outright slander.  Surely we are not the only one that has gone through this with McAfee. Can anyone offer any tips on how to get this resolved quickly?

Thanks.

18 Replies
Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 2 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

You may not get an answer from McAfee HQ for 8 or 10 hours, as it's night time there. Here, it's the early hours so I won't spend too long on this. First, the whole site rating process is extremely complicated, far more so than I realised when I started to look into it. The best thing I can advise is that you read through a post I made a week or so back - https://community.mcafee.com/message/158343#158343 - and follow the link. It might make things a little clearer (or possibly not. It is a White Paper, after all).

I've checked your site report in a new Beta site testing program - Beta, so not guaranteed bug-free, note - and it came up with the message 'Spam URLs'. I'm not sure quite what that means exactly, but I suspect your site URL may have been found in email(s) classed by McAfee as spam. Don't take my word for that, but if that's all it is it's not a critical fault, which would explain the Yellow (Caution) rating. If this finding is wrong, it would have to be followed up by someone in McAfee to find out exactly why it's wrong. I guess that explains the 4-6 weeks bit, since I doubt that someone would be on it full-time.

You say you've made a dispute claim, so you may already know this stuff, but it's worth recapping everything that's mentioned in or linked to from this thread.

As for the lack of response from Tech Support, I think that SiteAdvisor is a pretty much a specialist sub-division within McAfee. It was an independent company, bought some years ago, but I think SiteAdvisor still has a certain degree of autonomy. That's just my impression, so please don't quote me as an expert. It would explain why the usual tech guys aren't too clued-up about it.

Finally, it looks to me as if the whole reputation-assessment process is, how can I put it, impressionistic. Unless a site is caught distributing virus-riddled software, a lot of it comes down to weighing up the merits and demerits of a site based on thousands of different factors. Sometimes it goes wrong, but more often it goes right even when that might be completely counter-intuitive.

You'll have to contact someone from McAfee who knows SiteAdvisor and knows how to get your rating double-checked. The right people do read these forums, although they usually monitor rather than get engaged. They like to know what's going on, so you might get lucky.

That's enough for now : read through the document(s) and wait to see if someone from inside McAfee gets in touch. That's the best I can do, sorry.

ascend-marketin
Former Member
Message 3 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I have attempted to read the white paper and it was way too complicated for me and didn't make alot of sense. All I want to know is why is our site flagged.  The site report that SiteAdvisor gives me is useless and offers no helpful information whatsoever.

McAfee has arbitrarily decided to put a big yellow warning sign in front of our business that says, "Don't go in here. It's dangerous. We can't tell you why, but believe us - it's dangerous!".  Anyone who uses SiteAdvisor is going to see this when they land on our page. I think Yahoo has integrated SiteAdvisor into their search engine, so the warning will show up there as well.  This is irresponsible on McAfee's part and they need to correct this.

I have also checked out the other links you posted prior to posting this message.  I appreciate you trying to help, though.

Message was edited by: ascendmarketing.com on 11/12/10 12:21:49 AM CST
exbrit
MVP
MVP
Message 4 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

There are some hints and links here too: https://community.mcafee.com/message/68874#68874

Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 5 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

There is something I'd like to clear up about your site. In your original post, you give the name of the site as "ascend-marketing.com".

However, your last post has the edit-related note "Message was edited by: ascendmarketing.com"

I paid no attention to this at first, but later it occurred to me to check both names to see if there were two websites, in case the similarity of name may have been a factor in your site rating.

There are indeed two sites here. One is rated green, one yellow.

ascendmarketing.com has an IP of 67.219.35.8 and traces to Pittsford, NY, USA

The Contact page lists an address at Ascend Marketing, Inc., 1044 Louise Meadow Dr, South Jordan, UT 84095

This website has a privacy policy, of sorts.

This website is rated green.

ascend-marketing.com  has an IP of 216.39.62.189 and traces to Sunnyvale, California, USA

The Contact page gives two addresses, both in Texas. The first is Ascend Marketing, 1450 Hughes Road, Suite #106, Grapevine, Texas 76051

This website appears to have no privacy policy.

This website is rated yellow.

Which one are you?

ascend-marketin
Former Member
Message 6 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

Thanks for catching that. The web site in question is ascend-marketing.com

Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 7 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

The similarity in the names may be significant in your site's rating. You'll have to ask a McAfee SiteAdvisor expert about that.

In the meantime, I've requested WOT (Web Of Trust) to review your website. It's in the queue for reviewing, with no indication of when it will be done. The WOT reviewers are experts in assessing sites, so I await their feedback with interest.

I would recommend that you read the following document for site owners, in particular the notes on Privacy Policy

http://www.mywot.com/en/trustseal/tips

The reviewers will notice if you don't have one and will mark you down accordingly.

Edit - I've also run a couple of pages through the W3C validation process. They're both W3C-compliant as far as the CSS goes, but both have problems with HTML and links. Having the W3C logos on your site's pages adds credibility and gives you a certain edge, and the validation is useful for picking up some of the less obvious errors.

Have a look at the reports for Home page HTML, Home page CSS, Home page links

Message was edited by: Hayton on 12/11/10 18:35:45 GMT
exbrit
MVP
MVP
Message 8 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

Due to user name length and the end of the original one disappearing in posts I altered it to ascend-marketing which seems to fit better.   Hope this is OK.

ascend-marketin
Former Member
Message 9 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

Thank you for submitting our site to WOT. I saw your comment on the WOT site. You mentioned our site uses cookies, but i'm not aware of any cookies on our site. We do not even have any pages on our site that require a login. Can you please explain why you think we have cookies on our site?  Thank you.

edit: I see the cookies are being generated by Google Analytics. Would that cause McAfee to mistake our site for a suspicious site?

Message was edited by: ascend-marketing on 11/12/10 2:05:41 PM CST
Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 10 of 19

Re: Our site has been flagged incorrectly

You are quite right to correct me about the cookies. I did say in my WOT note that I was viewing the site with IE8, and IE is not the best browser for identifying cookies. I brought up the site in Firefox, which has much better cookie identification. Your site has only one session cookie; the others are 3rd-party cookies from Google, and one from statcounter. I went back to WOT and amended the entry to remove that comment. I have also noted that your site could become fully W3C-compliant with relatively little effort.

I don't think the presence of cookies affects the rating of a site. I'm pretty sure this came up in one of the first discussions I saw here. The reasoning seems to be that users have the ability to block cookies if they want to, and McAfee at least screens cookies and automatically deletes certain classes of cookie. No, cookies aren't really a problem unless they're particularly long-lasting. In any case, most of the attention at the moment is being given to the thorny question of LSOs - Flash cookies.

Apologies for the slip-up, and thank you for pointing it out. I try to be fair.

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