Google Increasing Communication with Webmasters - Tell Them About It
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The first talk of some kind of program to inform webmasters when they were violating Google's guidelines came in Matt's blog in late September of 2005. There he mentioned that "We've started a pilot program to alert sites that we consider to be outside our quality guidelines." Matt went on to explain that they weren't sending email to every site that receives a spam penalty. "This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here-while-consolidating-your-debt-and-buy-some-posters-about
-online-casinos.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing..."
It's clearly not in Google's best interest to penalize sites that have made honest mistakes. Remember, Google's goal is to give its users the most relevant results. When a site is penalized for a simple mistake, but otherwise has good content, that means that Google can't deliver that site as a search result, even if it would otherwise be the most relevant one. So, in order to serve its users better, Google started emailing certain webmasters that clearly weren't spamming intentionally, to notify them of the problems with their site, give some idea of what they needed to do, and let them know how to submit their site for reinclusion in Google's index once they fixed the problem.
In this blog entry, Matt included a sample email to give webmasters an idea of what to expect. It began with "While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines...In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our results...Currently pages from [your site] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days." The sample email goes on to pinpoint the specific problem, which in this sample was hidden text on a particular page, and even cites the page and the text itself. Finally, it goes on to explain how to resubmit the page for indexing.
This alone would be enough to get some webmasters excited; it certainly excited Matt. "I'm glad we're trying to proactively contact webmasters and site owners when there's an issue with their site in Google. I'm so excited that I split an infinitive in that sentence, didn't I?" While this initial move meant that Google was boldly going where no search engine had gone before, more was to come, as Matt informed us in his blog late in April.
Next: The Sitemaps Team Gets Involved >>
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