You make a great point. If a website owner is non-responsive then they don’t belong in the rankings because they failed to attend to the needs of their users by offering a quality resource without the risk of loss. I still feel that they best place for a website with malware is not in SERPs.

I wonder how a webmaster should handle the negativity that would come with your listings showing you have malware? As long as it takes for users to remove it from their computers, I doubt it.

The idea of leaving them in the SERPs and warning the user will more likely lead that user to not go back to the warned site because it isn’t worth the risk. Transparency is important, but I think that safety, rather than transparency is much more important to users in general.

By leaving the site in serps with a malware warning attached, Google gives users important information while protecting them.

I totally understand your point of view and removing malware infected sites from serps is a legitimate course of action. Personally, I’m glad that Google erred on the site of transparency though.

I absolutely understand your point, however, two caveats, first if the website owner is proactive, they would be maintaining their website (but malware still happens) and second, if malware is found on their site, they should want it to be removed so they can address the issue.

It’s like being sick, if you have a cold and are in an office, go home, get rest and get better, but as long as you are out in the population, you risk infecting others and that isn’t being a good member of your community, certainly not providing a positive environment for your visitors.

Google doesn’t allow the user to click through. Clicking on the result on the serp page will lead to a warning interstitial page. If the user really wants to proceed to the site (which I don’t recommend), they can type the url into the browser manually. Of course, FF3 and Chrome provide further protection by also using Google’s malware blacklist – even for manually typed urls.

Taking your assumption in this case, wouldn’t the absence of traffic from Google get your attention? I think that notifying a website owner shouldn’t be a requirement of any search engine, but if you are looking for insight from the likes of Google, set up a webmaster tools account and be notified. I think that if Google and Yahoo were trying to be realistic and looking out for the user, they wouldn’t include the listing, or at the least, not allow a user to click through.