Should Google notify you when you've been penalised?

[internetheaven]

I've been trying to think of possible down sides for webmasters and Google for keeping the fact someone has been penalised a big secret. It would be simple for them to have a little red notification when you log into WebmasterTools saying "We have found something concerning on your site and you have been penalised in the rankings for it." A person would therefore be able to look through his/her site and see if they had been hacked, find duplicate url/content issues, check their backlinks thoroughly etc. etc.

Why make us guess if we have been penalised? Surely it would benefit SERPS if good sites were able to be notified when problems arise that affect how they appear in rankings? Surely it would benefit Google if webmasters were made aware of duplicate content issues?

Only possible downside I could think of:

1. Black Hats could use it to test individual bad practices to see which Google will/will not notice.

BUT, I can't see that as an actual issue. The length of time it would take to test out black hat theories one by one with so many other variables and with some techiniques de-ranking a site on merit rather than actual filter tripping would mean it would not be an effective spam testing technique, would it?

[Reno]

Black Hats could use it to test individual bad practices to see which Google will/will not notice.

It seems that Google could easily keep a record in regards to how many times a site had to be notified in regards to unacceptable practices. For example, "3 strikes and you're out". So as you said, it would be a serious pain for the blackhats to have to "test" every variable AND have to get a new domain/site every third time.

..........................

[tedster]

Well, Google does notify site owners about penalties in some cases - but only when they feel that the website is not intentionally trying to manipulate rankings. And Google's judgement on that count is rather strict. Still, it's more than they used to do and more than any other search engine does.

There's another issue here, too. Webmasters tend to use the word "penalty" rather loosely, compared to the way Google uses it. For example, your page can be filtered out because it looks like a duplicate, and not have that be a "duplicate content penalty". It's just that another site with almost the same content outranks you, and the lower ranked url gets filtered out to keep their end users happy.

Why scraped content can rank higher than the original site that had top ranking for it for a long time - that's a different question.

One duplicate problem that affected many sites in the past was improper handling of a "custom 404" page. Today, you cannot verify your site in GWT until that's handled - you do get a message.

[keepontruckin]

tedster - can you elaborate on what google considers improper 404 handling? on our site the server sends a 404 error code but then loads the home page.. is that acceptable or should we setup a real error page with some category or page choices for the user?

[tedster]

That's OK - it's the server header's http status code for the original request that matters. Many sites send a 302, and that causes every bad url requested to get indexed, and as whatever content was on their "custom" page.

You may find it better to create a true custom page, rather than just re-use the Home Page. It's better for the visitor, who then clearly knows that the URL didn't work, and there's no risk that a server error would start creating dupe content from your home page.