Google Notifying Webmasters of Penalties

Google Penalties

[Whitey]

Matt Cutts and Virginia Fox at Google have been quite pro-active in the last few days with this trial re communication with webmasters over penalties. Several WebmasterWorld members have had some published Q & A's on Matt's blog.

[mattcutts.com...]

I still wonder if there's room for a paid service for 1 on 1 communication, later, when and if these trials are successful per this thread :

[webmasterworld.com...]

Personally, i hope it works so that the quality of communication can improve between webmasters and with Google, eliminating a lot of the BS with facts.

[tedster]

It looks like Google will be trying at least two avenues for this type of feedback. One is the direct email (if they have an email address that works). And, as was discussed at the Boston PubCon, the Sitemaps program may prove to be a more effective spot for quality feedback. Reference: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Ellio]

My belief is that Matt Cutts and Google are interested in resolving genuine problems for genuine sites but are faced with the problem of how to get genuine sites to comminicate without inviting the spammers and grey hats to request help in their thousand too.

I have been lucky and had excellent service from google in relation to Spam Reporting and the homepage only issue.

I think Google need to think of a new way to let genuine whitehats communicate to get their indexing fixed or spam reported, perhaps by setting up a report service that auto checks your site for guideline breaches first before allowing direct communication with the Google engineers. Sites that fail would be penalised their and then. Only fair after all.

Might just put the chancer borderline greyhats off don't you think?

[Whitey]

Matt has expressed that he does not want to communicate with spammers who can test how far they can push, which i fully support. So there needs to be a way to seperate these 2 groups.

Perhaps a process of authenticating genuine webmasters could be enacted with a combination of paid subscription to a service, with some reporting system around the very helpful suggestion put forward by Elio above.

My feeling is that only a small number of webmasters would subscribe anyway, but that they would be invaluable to perfecting the Google product/webmaster relationship.

[Swanson]

At the end of the day though, do you think heavy duty spammers will subscribe to sitemaps or wait for feedback?

Instead of dealing with webspam in this manner, why not deal with more important issues like allowing webmasters to identify root domains and root content or 301 domains or supplemental pages?

[Phil_Payne]

> It looks like Google will be trying at least two avenues for this type of feedback. One is the direct email (if they have an email address that works).

webmaster@ doesn't work for three of my sites.

I've suggested several times that the "responsible email address" should be a tag in the XML sitemap file.

[trinorthlighting]

I think google should not charge for this service. For webmasters who take time with the sitemap programs this is a perfect service. I feel that google can release some information to webmasters that will not jeapordize the "secret" algo. I will put some more thought into this.

BTW, google should use the email address that is registered with google sitemaps. If the site is not registered it should use the default of webmaster@ or even check arin.

[stinkfoot]

It is just another lie I am afraid. Any requests to google are still coming back with auto responces.

They may well now have a team of thousands that could help .. but they aint interested.

They are there to make money not to make the internet world a better place.

RIP to our friend Google.

Welcome to the dawn of evil!

[Tearabite]

Huh?

I sent a request (a question) to adsense support a week or 2 ago, and had a response from a real-human in 2 business-days..

[Whitey]

I just sent the reinclusion request - so we'll see how long it takes [ and indeed if we receive a reply ]

[Whitey]

To date no response confirmation email or information from Google has been sent.