Google Alerting Webmasters of Guideline Violations
Leslie Walker at Washingtonpost.com may be stirring up the ranking juice, but Matt Cutts says that Google is going to start feeding spammers some ‘egg on your face’ juice with a trial program which will notify some spammers when their sites are penalized by Google. In order to receive these notifications, the web site must be registered with the Google Sitemaps program.
Matt says that Google will be using a pick and choose system to determine which webmasters are worthy of notification, and which should just be banned from the index in the dead of night – Ninja style.
Here’s Matt’s example of the Google Sitemaps Notification of violations of the webmaster guidelines system working to do good for the end user and rehabilitate the site owner:
I recently saw a small pub in England that had hidden text on its page. That could result in the site being removed from Google, because our users get angry when they click on a search result and discover hidden text–even if the hidden text wasn’t what caused the site to be returned in Google’s results. In this case it was a particular shame, because the hidden text was the menu that the pub offered. That’s exactly the sort of text that a user would like to see on the web site; making the text visible would have made the site more useful.
That’s an example of a legitimate site.
Then Matt gives the example of silent spam site assassination:
On the other hand, if the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there’s no reason that we’d want the spammer to realize that we’d caught those pages. So Google clearly shouldn’t contact every site that is penalized–it would tip off spammers that they’d been caught, and then the spammers would start over and try to be sneakier next time.
More info on the program is available on the Sitemaps Blog, or site owners can skip the entire process and build sites which do not violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
