StopBadware victimizes another site
Home > News	February 11, 2007 8:18 PM

StopBadware recently blacklisted Mister Poll, an internet polling site. This comment captures the frustration experienced by their webmaster:

Wow. My head is spinning with that one. I can’t even express how amazingly unreasonable it is to expect sites to police every single link that’s placed within their content. Not only would you have to review each link when it’s first posted, but you would have to continually re-visit them forever, to make sure every site linked to is still clean. Impossible.

So some spammer posts a link to a questionable site in your message forums, and wham, you’re out of Google. Even worse, somebody posts a link to a legitimate site, and that site is later hacked in some way. Not only do they get blacklisted, so do you and everybody else on the web who links to them.

That’s unreal. That’s the death of the hyperlink and essentially the death of the web. What kind of a web are we left with if the strands don’t interconnect? It’s no longer a web, but a massive stretch of lonlely islands. Somebody stop these StopBadware.org folks. Please.

On a good note, John Palfrey of StopBadware and Matt Cutts of Google both stepped up to help fix the problem.