McAfee SiteAdvisor gives PCmag.com yellow warning ratingcustomer adventures, add-ins and toolbars, spam — by TDavid @ 8:07 am PST
 (1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ... |
This morning’s reading led me to pcmag.com and I noticed the McAfee SiteAdvisor (Hmm SiteAdvisor review grade: B+) label turn from green (good) to yellow (warning). I right clicked and looked at the site details to find the following:
After entering our e-mail address on this site, we received 28 e-mails per week. We had some difficulty unsubscribing.
28 e-mails in a week? That’s extreme, I wonder if the SiteAdvisor bot got caught in some kind of loop? Seems like I get a bunch of those E-Week emails (rarely do I read them, do you?) which I’m pretty sure originate from the Ziff Davis / PC Mag camp. I used to be a fan of PC Mag but one too many ads and questionable renewal tactics sent me packing. Still have a subscription to their download utility service which at 20 bones a year for all utility downloads is a good deal versus $7.97 per download.
Several reviewers in the SiteAdvisor comments indicate that these emails are opt-in and that it can be hard to unsubscribe is confirmed. I don’t see many yellow label warnings for bigger, established sites like pcmag.com. Have you seen other bigger sites with yellow or (gasp) red labels?
On a somewhat related note, our blogging group has been waiting awhile for SiteAdvisor to kick out a report for vtoreality.com. Anybody know how long this process actually takes? That site remains stuck in the gray (not yet rated) status which in some cases makes me as wary as seeing yellow. Every site older than a couple years we operate including Hmm that I checked is showing green. Might want to check your sites and see if you’re green, not so mellow yellow or dead red.
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Good thing they’re not on IconBuffet. It’s the unstoppable loop. You can’t unsubscribe without killing your account.
Comment by darkmoon — August 18, 2007 @ 9:09 am PST
I too am having problems with SiteAdvisor listing my domain as yellow because I “Might advertise in junk emails” Who determins if SiteAdvisor software is acting like The HAL-9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey? and doling out wrong ratings. I have complained several times to McAfee but they would only give me a link to a pay per minute help site of theirs, so I am posting my dissatisfaction on my blogs and websites, also in comments about others that have either noticed or experienced the same problems with SiteAdvisor.
Thanks and have a great day.
Comment by Feral Pundit — August 19, 2007 @ 1:01 pm PST
Feral - I wonder if your hosting company gave you an IP address of a site that was used by a spammer in the past? Check the various spam lists and see if your site is on there. If that’s the case, request a new IP.
Comment by TDavid — August 20, 2007 @ 12:19 pm PST
Hi. Thanks for the reply I checked and I do not appear to be on any spam lists, at least that I could find, however I think that it must be a glitch that SiteAdvisor refuses to check into for me, as they claim that I “Might” advertise in junk email, so there must be something triggering that improper response.
Thanks again for your response to my comment. You have an awesome site
Comment by Feral Pundit — August 20, 2007 @ 2:33 pm PST
Let’s not even talk about protection issues from outside sources. Mcafee poses more problems than it will ever prevent. Last week multitudes of users were unable to connect to the internet, because of an McAfee update. The endless system resources it uses. Crashes that are almost impossible to recover from, and cut and paste support, make this entire product useless.
Mcafee’s new Site Advisor product is operated by bots and recently by people with nothing better to do, than trash their competitions sites. McAfee operates this component as a competition among reviewers to see who can hammer the most sites. Anyone can be a reviewer, it requires no expertise, just an agenda and the desire to compete. The one consistency throughout the reviews was the dislike of affiliate marketing, which Amazon, Ebay and McAfee all use.
I would advise everyone to steer clear of this beast as it is trying to force it’s meaningless rating system on the search engines. The end result is, McAfee controls the content you see. If you want big brother, this is the product for you. All Others Steer Clear. BTW, I am a McAfee Site Advisor reviewer.
Comment by Shawn Cain — August 25, 2007 @ 7:30 am PST