After hearing unanimous agreement to the suggestion that Google (finally) contact site publishers when their sites run afoul of Google’s webmaster guidelines, Matt Cutts noted that Google has begun to do just that.
It was one of those questions that has come up at conferences before: “Why don’t you tell someone about a problem before dropping them?” Many webmasters have been frustrated to see their sites suddenly drop from Google’s index, with no idea why it happened.
Quite a few certainly knew what they were doing, in trying to game Google’s algorithms. Plenty of so-called “black hats” operate in the search optimization field. But other times, it was their clients who made a bad choice in hiring an optimization firm and got stuck with a site that sets off alarms due to banned ranking tactics.
To satisfy the call for improved notification, Google has taken the step of adding a new feature to its Sitemaps service. Participants in Sitemaps will see a new Summary page, where a webmaster will see an advisory note if a site has violated Google’s webmaster guidelines, according to Vanessa Fox on the Sitemaps team.
Not every site deserves such a warning, as Cutts cited an example of those who don’t merit one:
(I)f the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there’s no reason that we’d want the spammer to realize that we’d caught those pages. So Google clearly shouldn’t contact every site that is penalized-it would tip off spammers that they’d been caught, and then the spammers would start over and try to be sneakier next time.
Google keeps the notification itself deliberately vague; if a site violates guidelines, Google will say so, but not the reason why.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
