Google Improves SEO Customer Service - The Precious 100
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Google has decided to contact 100 webmasters whose sites were banned or dropped from the Google index for whatever reason. It has been reported that they tried to contact the webmasters directly by searching the whois records for the domains, and falling short of that have also sent e-mails to generic web address for websites (such as webmaster@www.xlwidgets,com and sales@xlwidgets.com).
Google has also copied the letter over to the website host provider, which has some people upset. Some fear that by notifying the hosting company, the host will shut the site down to prevent the whole server seen as a bad neighborhood.
Of course with just 100 websites receiving these letters and 8 billion pages indexed, I do not think this is an issue many webmasters should worry about. I would also say for those who ran scraper sites, and other hard core black hat SEO tactics, that you should not expect an e-mail inviting you back.
Google's intention here is to build and foster friendship and partnership with white hat webmasters. It also seems to be built for the SMB type of business, who are perhaps not involved in an SEO campaign. They may have thought that using some junk software could improve their standings in the search engine results pages. Google sees these sites as legitimate small business who made a poor choice. These business owners will not be visiting an SEO forum or even turning to an SEO company for help, so Google is reaching out to those types of business in their initial test.
Matt Cutts, a Google employee who has shed some insight to the inner workings of Google's algorithmic team, cited one of the websites in his blog. It is a small business (http://www.sewshop.com/acart) which apparently purchased software that made up gibberish pages, and it used a bad JavaScript redirect.
It is apparent that Google is out to help the smaller webmaster, who probably is less Internet-savvy than other website owners. These people may not have the economic means to hire a search engine optimization firm of good reputation to solve their coding issues which led to their sites being removed from the Google index.
Next: Re-inclusion for All >>
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