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September 16, 2005

Google to Let You Know If and How Your Site is Spam

There's a monster of a thread running over at ThreadWatch right now. Apparently, Google's begun sending out emails to webmasters who are in the process of being penalized, letting them know that they're about to be hit, and for what infraction.

It was mostly spectulation until Matt Cutts jumped in and said this:

Google is trying out a pilot program to alert site owners when we're removing their site for violating our guidelines. JavaScript redirects are the first trial, but we've also sent a few emails about hidden text, I believe. This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that "Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95" software was doing. Personally, I think opening up a line of communication to let webmasters know when we're taking action is a really good thing--a site owner doesn't have to guess about what happened. But again, we're starting with a trial program.

On one hand, this is great. It will save a ton of time in those cases where evidence is strong that a site's been banned/penalized, but you just don't know exactly what for. I hope Yahoo follows suit.

One big downside is that they are also CC'ing the offending site's webhost. As mentioned in the thread, what're the chances your webhost drops you if they start getting emails from Google about how you aren't complying with Google's guidelines.

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