Google is boosting its safe browsing search policy. The tech giant announced that it would start branding websites which continue to violate its directives. The repeat offenders will be appropriately flagged. In such cases, the webmasters will not be able to file an appeal for 30 days.
Google further clarified that the users would have the freedom to click on any link. However, Google will flash a warning for suspicious links. This will be followed by another warning page trying to dissuade the user from venturing further into the websites guilty of safety violations.
The internet search giant started the new policy in response to a loophole found in its earlier initiative. Brooke Heinichen, a member of Google's Safe Browsing team, said, "we've observed that a small number of websites will cease harming users for long enough to have the warnings removed, and will then revert to harmful activity." The new scheme will target websites which oscillate between compliant and non-compliant behavior.
Google also said that the websites which are hacked and are used for malicious intent would not be labeled as a repeat offender. This policy will cover only those sites which willfully post mistrustful content.
Google introduced its Safe Browsing initiative nine years ago. The initiative involved warning users as and when they landed on a website, which has been deemed by Google web crawlers to be using malware, spam or unwanted ads. Earlier this year, Google activated the feature for the mobile version of Chrome. The feature used to be limited to the desktop version of the browser.