How to Avoid Risky Sites

I've gotten several emails from readers asking for ways to keep their system safe from viruses. Besides installing and updating your system's anti-virus software, you should also give McAfee SiteAdvisor a try.

When you do a search on Yahoo! or Google, it's hard to tell which sites are safe to navigate. Sometimes you end up in dubious sites that automatically install adware, spyware, or viruses, or they scam you into signing up for "free trials" that require you to enter your credit card information. Even savvy computer users can't always avoid these threats until it's too late.

I installed McAfee's SiteAdvisor, which is a free browser plug-in for Firefox or IE that flags these web sites with color-coded safety buttons that let you know whether to proceed safely, with caution or not at all. The download can be installed in less than five minutes, but it helps further protect your machine from installing unwanted programs and offers enough information to help you avoid potential scams. This is especially helpful if you share your computer with family members who may not know better and just click away.

What's great is that users can also offer their feedback, so you can read about their experience before clicking on that particular link. SiteAdvisor's blog has some great eye-opening articles like "10 Misleading Gas Card Promotions" or "'Miracle Diet' Web Sites That Thin the Wallet, Not the Waist" where it identifies almost 75 scammy sites.

And if you think that "sponsored results" are safe, think again. The study found that these results were "two to four times more likely than organic results to lead to red or yellow rated sites."

So what are some keywords that return "red" or risky results? Google's top five riskiest keyword searches are "free screensavers," "Bearshare," "screensavers," "Winmx," and "limewire." Other innocent terms such as "care bears," "birthday card," "South Beach Diet," and even "weather" also yield risky site results.

I always worry about sites that contain the word "MySpace" when searching for site templates, yet these web sites are frequented by MySpace users on a daily basis when they search for animated GIFs, games, or other scripts. Surprisingly, after doing a search for "myspace layouts" most of the results on the first page had green flags.