Your domain has a 20+ year ownership history. Are you the first owner? The suggestion that you switch to .com could be a subtle way to tell you that your domain has a bad reputation that cannot be fixed. Once Google thinks a domain is bad, it’s hard to change their mind. If you’re not the first owner, you don’t know what the previous owners did using the domain.
Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#32Ran into the same issue when I purchased a .ml domain (naively not looking into why .ml is such a cheap TLD to buy good names for, it has a super high spam risk). Purchased a different .com domain and haven't had any issues since. I didn't change content or anything, besides changing the domains in all of my links, and the same google ad campaigns and workspace for the new URL were able to be created without issue.
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reputation is crowdsourced. Perhaps at some point Teamsnap lost control of their infra and sent out a bunch of malware. Why do you assume the mistake was Google's? Same question for the OP. If Google was trying to tell me my site was compromised the first course of action I would take is to have a look into that, or page secops, before that situation spreads further.
After years of similar issues, why are you giving them the benefit of the doubt? Especially if they won't explain what the issue is and gave out such ludicrous advice to the OP?
Which similar issue? The other people who were hosting malware who didn't realize it?
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#34One thing I thought it could be is I use PostHog for analytics / heat map recording, but I tried completely removing it and they still rejected it.
It looks like you still have rrweb running. Have you tried removing that?
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#35Your domain has a 20+ year ownership history. Are you the first owner? The suggestion that you switch to .com could be a subtle way to tell you that your domain has a bad reputation that cannot be fixed. Once Google thinks a domain is bad, it’s hard to change their mind. If you’re not the first owner, you don’t know what the previous owners did using the domain.
Good shout, I never even considered this. Now that you mention it, I did buy the domain from a seller back in 2020, so yes perhaps this has something to do with it.
I'm checking web.archive.org and it all looks pretty innocent so far apart from the domain for sale pages that started around 2011
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
After years of similar issues, why are you giving them the benefit of the doubt? Especially if they won't explain what the issue is and gave out such ludicrous advice to the OP?
Which similar issue? The other people who were hosting malware who didn't realize it?
There have been quite a few complaints along these lines on HackerNews and elsewhere. Sometimes Google gets it wrong, and then people end up stuck, as you can't contact them.
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#37Couple of things you can check: 1. See if VirusTotal lists your site (including subdomains, app.domain and www.domain, etc): https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/url If wrongly flagged, reach out to each security vendor manually - takes about 3-5 days to get them to rescan manually and remove any flags. 2. Check for any dodgy javascript libraries you might inadvertently be using. Specifically, just remove all non-rele…
Thanks I was trying this recently and it came back all green.
On a related note, one interesting thing I did discover, due to a small misconfiguration of NextJS + App Router, I was getting two closing tags in my markup, which https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/ was flagging as potential site compromise, I guess because a site with malware injecting unwanted scripts could cause broken markup as a common side effect? Anyway I long since fixed that and it hasn't made a difference.
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#38Your domain has a 20+ year ownership history. Are you the first owner? The suggestion that you switch to .com could be a subtle way to tell you that your domain has a bad reputation that cannot be fixed. Once Google thinks a domain is bad, it’s hard to change their mind. If you’re not the first owner, you don’t know what the previous owners did using the domain.
> The suggestion that you switch to .com could be a subtle way to tell you
If it is, then they should say what they mean instead.
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#39It's not the same thing, but it's still Google, soo.... all three of my kids are on school or club sports teams that use Teamsnap ( https://www.teamsnap.com/ ) for coordination. This includes exposing calendar subscriptions to Google Calendar and delivering messages & event/change notifications via email (and push notification via the mobile app). For some reason, Gmail has decided that Teamsnap is no longer a truste…
Cant confirm, just tried and it got sent into my inbox, no warnings. It even got marked as important.
So, after checking this thread again I went and searched for unread Teamsnap emails in my inbox again. None are displaying warnings now/anymore. This is after several days where all of them were, and since I posted this reply an hour ago the problem has ceased.
Re: Ask HN: Google Ads Rejected My SaaS as Compromised Site
#40I am struggling with this problem also. After several failed attempts at appeals, they also suspended a family member's ads account saying they were detected as related to me. Have resorted to paying thousands of dollars for google un-suspension services. Have never knowingly broke any google rule ever.