When reading the various SEO forums, one of the bigger complaints I’ve noticed is the lack of two-way communication with Google.
Many people have often wondered why Google doesn’t notify webmasters of impending penalties and banishments before these punishments are issued. Now it appears that Google’s lack of communication could be a thing of the past. The reason for the optimism stems from a Threadwatch post that broke the news about Google’s new program aiming to improve the level of two-way communication between Google and its constituents.
According to Matt Cutts, who commented in the Threadwatch post, Google is testing a service that sends out warning emails to webmasters whose sites are about to be removed for violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. During the testing phase, Google is focusing on sites using JavaScript redirects; however they have sent emails to webmasters using hidden text in their site’s copy. Here is a snippet of the email in question:
Dear site owner or webmaster of [url removed],
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [link removed]
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from [url removed] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days….
Threadwatch has the entire email if you are interested in reading more.
Matt feels the email service is a step in the right direction. As a webmaster, there is a benefit to actually being told, straight from the horse’s mouth, what guidelines were violated instead of having to rely on forum chatter to fill in the blanks. My question is this, if a webmaster receives one of these warning emails and makes the necessary corrections, will the offending site still be removed and/or penalized?
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
