Effects of being flagged as badware in Google
Just a quick note further to my post on wordpress and badware risks; the blog that this happened on had all of its PageRank withdrawn, which has just been reinstated.
This indicates to me that there is a likely PageRank penalty of 6 months from the date that a site is flagged as badware. Of course presumably sites must rectify the badware problem in order to get their PageRank reinstated.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:55 pm
I had a site flagged by Google (for a wordpress badware embedded link on one post due that WP venerability like a year ago), the pagerank and even search ranking was never affected. All that happened was the huge warning anytime someone click on a link in Google’s search listing to the site (and no way to get to the site without manually copying the url). And as soon as they realized it was fixed the site was fine in their listing and no more warning message. It did take like 10 days for them to do that though.