Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has picked up on a slight adjustment to Google Webmaster Guidelines in terms of penalizing sites.
Previous Google Webmaster Guidelines:
… we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.
New Webmaster Guidelines:
… we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.
The change is the terminology between removing a site from Google and removing or penalizing a site.
Philipp brings this up, and I also wonder, what was the cause of this change to Google Webmaster Guidelines terminology?
Law suits? The widespread discussion of the Google -30 penalty?
Maybe they will label the sites like they do with Malware sites.
“The site you are visiting has keyword stuffing invisible text and authority links hidden behind CSS layers! Proceed at your own risk.”
~B