Warning from Google about black hat SEO

Is this real?

[Essex_boy]

I received a warning email from Google saying that I was about tor receive a 30 exclusion from teh SERPs due to some dodgy SEO practice id been in volved with.

Yes I plead guilty and shouldnt have done it, but does Google warn people? Or this a 'joke' email?

[jomaxx]

A week isn't that long, either in terms of Google updates or of expecting webmasters to implement the changes suggested.

Why are you posting this? Are you saying you didn't bother to remove the hidden text?

[JayC]

> Any idea which mail id Google chooses to send
> the mail to? Is it the mail id listed with
> whois records or harvested from the site?

Matt said this, about that, here [mattcutts.com]: "Our primary way of finding who to contact is via email addresses from the web. If there really aren’t any, we use a few addresses like [e-mail] and [e-mail]. We may try a contact address by doing a whois search as another backup, but we will avoid emailing the technical or admin contact from whois."

[g1smd]

This is quite hilarious; you have to read right to the end though: [thepeoplescube.com...]

[2by4]

yes, that's a funny one. Even when he was busted for hidden text, hidden links, css cloaking, he still tries to pretend it was ok because the other sites belonged to 'his friends', or that it was ok because he made them too.

That guy is about as pathetic as I'd expect, but it was very funny following that story. Sad though, he just can't seem to grasp that he's the one who caused his own problems, he keeps trying to blame someone else, what an idiot. Give me a black hat pro any day, they just shrug and go, yeah, onto the next site, no big deal. At least they know what they're doing.

When you're caught, it's much better to just admit it and move on, makes you look like less of an imbecile.

Matt Cutts on this is very funny too, sometimes people get so stupid that a boring day gets fun, I'm sure Matt had fun tracing down all those weak black hat tricks to all the sites they spidered out to.

[idolw]

Essex_boy, from what I read at Matt Cutts' blog they only e-mail really important sites that they believe use such techniques by mistake.

[colin_h]

I wrote a few weeks ago about some newly aquired clients of mine that are getting the following message and then wiped off the index a couple of days after.

I'm getting more redesign contracts these days because of the daft practices of black hats.

All the Best

Col :-)

------- Message ----------

Dear site owner or webmaster of yoursite.com/,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [google.com...]
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from yoursite.com/ are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

----------- message ------------

[rkhare]

colin, thanks a ton for sharing this message, i think even i recd a spam few weeks back diguised as google.

and about you sharing this email in forum ..... is it allowed?