Google Increasing Communication with Webmasters - The Sitemaps Team Gets Involved
(Page 3 of 4 )
On April 26, Matt stated in his blog that "Google's webspam team is working with our Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site." He emphasized that it was still an experiment, but it was moving Google more in line with its "don't be evil" motto. As Matt explained, "I think the ideal search engine would also tell legitimate site owners when they risk not doing well in Google."
Later on in the same post, Matt explains why Google has taken this extra step. Some sites are hard to contact by email because they don't give any email information, or they don't receive/read/respond to the email that Google has sent. So, with this new approach, "we are now alerting some sites that they have penalties via the webmaster console in Sitemaps. For example, if you verify your site in Sitemaps and then are penalized by the webspam team for hidden text on your pages, we may explicitly confirm a penalty and offer you a reinclusion request specifically for that site."
Note Matt's use of the word "may," please. He included a couple of examples to illustrate this point. His first example was a nice little hotel in Bath, England. It was clearly a legitimate business, but it had hidden text on the site. Needless to say, this was the kind of website that Google would want to inform of the potential violation of Google's webmaster guidelines, so they could fix it.
The second example was the kind of site that makes your eyes bleed and your brain go "Wtf?!" Just from the picture Matt provided in his blog, it was easy to see that the site practiced keyword stuffing; deliberately included misspellings; used nonsense or gibberish text, probably auto-generated; and apparently had tons of doorway pages. Matt went on to describe a number of other violations that the site committed which weren't apparent from the screen shot.
This was an example of a site that had clearly violated Google's guidelines in such a way that it deserved to be banned. As Matt explained, "Needless to say, I'd rather not tip off spammers like this when we find their pages." Or, put another way, good riddance to bad rubbish!
Next: Reactions to the Change >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
/ 7 
