If you are a webmaster or a blogger, keeping your website/blog free from harmful links must top your priorities. By keeping your website clean from harmful links, you safeguard your site visitors against dangerous links, which are often placed by the innocent commentators, often done unknowingly. Here is where F-Secure Safe Links comes to your rescue.
What is F-Secure Safe Links?
In their own words-
F-Secure Safe Links is a totally new kind of service that enables site owners to safeguard their site visitors against dangerous links with a unique link analysis done in real-time, for each page view!
There are lot of services like AVG Link scanner and URLVoid available to check if a particular URL/link is safe enough to be accessed. But then, these are client based services, which means, the users need to be using them on their side in order to identify dangerous links.
F-Secure Safe Links provides real-time protection against harmful links from the server side, meaning, the users need not install anything on their browser or desktop, since Safe Links runs as a javascript on the website itself.
Harnessing F-Secure’s cloud anti-malware technology, this new service makes you and your readers aware of when malicious links have been posted to your site. Posting of bad links – often unknowingly – by site visitors to blog comments or discussion areas is one of the biggest reasons why sites get blacklisted by search engines. F-Secure Safe Links helps you avoid this situation by showing site visitors clear security ratings for all the links on each page load, and by providing simple statistics for tracking the overall link safety on your site.
What I like?
What I like about F-Secure Safe Links?
- It’s an unique service which tries to provide better and safe web experience to the users without the need to install anything extra on their side
- For the webmasters, it is very easy to sign-up and setup Secure Links. All you need to do is go to this page, sign-up, add the site(s) you wish to monitor and put the generated JavaScript on your website (in footer.php if you are using Wordpress). That’s it! You are good to go!
- One can easily enable/disable the Safe Links functionality right from the dashboard, without the need to touch the JavaScript.
- Though I personally try to avoid third party JavaScripts as much as possible, to their credit, F-Secure have ensured that the script is lightweight and doesn’t affect the site performance since the whole process takes place in their cloud service.
- The stats provided in the dashboard helped me know about couple of harmful links present in my blog.
What I don’t like?
- The stats merely indicate the number of unsafe links present on the site, without providing the exact details where they are present. That is something basic which needs to be provided.
- It would have been better if F-Secure had provided an “exclusion list” for the webmasters. Something like the links to Facebook, Twitter and Feedburner can be excluded by default.
- The big negative according to me was the way it affected the look and feel of the website. Check out the below screenshot to understand what I mean. This is where the previous point can help the webmasters to provide Safe Links functionality without actually affecting the website design.
F-Secure Safe Links is still in beta, so we can expect it to evolve and improve over time. I would suggest you to give it a shot by signing up here.
Note: If you decide to sign-up, you can help me win an iPad by just mailing F-Secure (ID: share-code@f-secure.com) with my SHARE CODE: BMJWJW. No obligations whatsoever!