Stephen E. Jones' home page WON'T harm your computer!

Update 13 July 2014. Google is no longer claiming that my home page will harm visitors' computers!

At Dan Porter's emailed suggestion that the problem may be in my members.iinet.net.au directory, I checked there and found down near the bottom of it a tiny shortcut file that I didn't put there (thanks Dan). I deleted it (and immediately regretted I did not save it because I could not prove that that was the problem).

I then emailed my ISP, iiNet, telling them what I had done, together with a screen capture of a Google error message which listed a "Suspicious snippet" of Java script:

The script includes the word "oemtechnology" that I had previously searched for in my folder of HTML files that I had uploaded to my website, but drew a blank. I therefore wrongly assumed that it was just an example. My ISP had not got back to me (I told them it was not urgent) so I assume that that since my home page is no longer blacklisted by Google, that was the problem.

So my apologies to Google's robot. I hope I have not hurt its feelings! For my sake I better not have :-) But it would have helped if it had not wrongly listed some of my HTML files as infected, when the problem was not in those files but that they contain a link back to my home page. It now seems that when Google's robot followed those links back to my home page it encountered the invisible Java script shortcut in my members.iinet.net.au directory and then blamed the files. I don't know how that Java script got into my online home directory, but now I am aware of the potential problem I will be on the lookout for it happening again.

I will add back links to my old files by linking my Sitemap.html file to my home page. I like my new less cluttered home page.

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Original 10 July 2014. Google continues to FALSELY claim that my home page, will harm visitors' computers. This is despite me requesting Google to tell me where exactly the problem is and my removal of all external links from those few files it listed. But still my home page remains blacklisted by Google. Finally I removed ALL links from my home page except to this my Shroud of Turin blog, but still a Google search of "Stephen E. Jones' home page" has the warning: "This site may harm your computer."

I have suggested to Google that the problem may be a circular error of theirs. Most of my pages have a link back to my Home Page. But if Google's robot falsely lists my Home Page as infected, it will falsely think every page that has a link to my Home Page is potentially harmful. And so on in an endless loop...! If so, I am not going to waste my time deleting every link to my home page in my hundreds of online pages, and nor should I have to. It would then be a Google bug that it should fix.

It doesn't bother me personally because these days my focus is on this my The Shroud of Turin blog. But it will be interesting to see if and when Google's robot finally wakes up to the fact that my home page cannot now possibly harm anyone's computers (if it ever could) and if and when my home page, and my other pages now cut-off from their root, will cease to be unfairly blacklisted by Google, or even listed by Google at all.

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