Social media tip for local businesses: Google declares two sites contain malware, using them can result in YOUR site being blocked. Reconsider your links, on your site and also what you use in your social media campaigns.

While Google is not the only search engine around, it still is the kingpin. And what Google wants, Google gets. Or rather, what Google doesn’t want, Google slaps. This is an important social media tip for local businesses to keep in mind.

Case in point, this weekend two popular sites were blacklisted by Google.

In order to “protect” us, Google often declares that sites are malicious. This may or may not be true, but that is actually beside the point. Once blacklisted, sites will be flagged as contained Malware–especially if you (or your potential customers) use the Google owned Chrome browser.

According to Google’s Safe Browsing page on del.icio.us:

Of the 370 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 69 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2014-10-26, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2014-10-26.

Malicious software includes 17 trojan(s), 14 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 1 new process(es) on the target machine

If you want to know more details about the most recent blacklist, read this article on WordFence: http://www.wordfence.com/blog/2014/10/a-malicious-del-icio-us/

A general rule of thumb is don’t click on a link you don’t know. If you use a link shortener (like bit.ly, which was also blacklisted, albeit temporarily) you may want to reconsider. If you use Twitter a lot for your business you may want/need to use the shorteners in order to not exceed the character limitations, but still it is good to keep in mind that many people will not click a link they can not read.