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Comment by nvrspyx | Hacker News Reader

You could simply host the binary on GitHub and GitLab and have the link on your website point directly to it. The user would never know, so you'd get the best of both worlds. You develop a direct relationship with your users without paying anything forward to GitHub or GitLab.

With that said, hosting the binary on those platforms won't necessarily help as Google can flag individual repos according to some other comments here.

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Every indication I've read is that simply linking to the binary download, even if it's offsite, will be enough to flag the page hosting the link. So I would have to link to an alternate site hosting the link, and risk that page being blocked instead, and then I'm right back where I started.

I would, if at all possible, prefer to find a solution to this problem so that I can directly host my software.

If you prefer to directly host it then you will have to wait (and hope that no one files a complaint about your domain).

At some point your domain will have a sufficient score and it will not show the warnings to users.

How long that will take is, however, outside of my knowledge and it would be nice to have some official reference about it; as it stands I agree with you that it feels like begging to a benevolent dictator.

The point is that these warning still appear for executable downloads from Github (at least they did a few years ago when I independently thought of this as a workaround) - my guess is that Microsoft and Google are using some kind of unique'ish binary fingerprint, such as Imphash or SSDEEP (in conjunction with other signals, such as domain age, digital signature etc)

My domain is fourteen years old and has a DA score of 53. I don't see it ever improving much from there.

The score for serving binaries would be a different metric than for SEO.

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