Google Adding New Spam Warnings In Webmaster Tools

Google is sending new warnings to webmasters when it suspects the sites may have spam-related problems that need to be addressed.

Over at Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz points to two new warnings that users have discovered in their Webmaster Tools accounts: a “notice of detected unnatural links” and a separate warning about cloaking.

That second warning comes from this help forum thread and, as you can see, is very detailed:

Dear site owner or webmaster of bfenthusiasts.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmas…er=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

We detected cloaking on your site and suspect this is the cause. For example at http://forums.bfenthusiasts.com/ we found:

racially online phentermine reviews racially biconvex Madames confuser Alberich adipex jackson ms guy Madames earls adipex uk buy biconvex confuser bewailing order adipex phentermine breath Alberich Eastwick sheik buttocks ambien 20mg dosage Madames bewailing bloated bowl diazepam vs xanax Steven occupies diligent penguin valium dosage iv confuser sniffed bowl monotonicity factual valium drug effects ambien cr bluelight Alberich sheik lorazepam od . Chariots adipex rx bewailing klonopin

For more information about what cloaking is, visit http://www.google.com/support/webmas…er=66355&hl=en.

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from bfenthusiasts.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp…-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/to…deration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

Note: if you have an account in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can verify the authenticity of this message by logging into https://www.google.com/webmasters/to…overview?hl=en and going to the Message Center.

Google has talked for some time now about wanting to increase its outreach to webmasters like this. In a webmaster video taped last month (with our Danny Sullivan on set), Google’s Matt Cutts talked about Google’s plans to make wemaster communication a priority in 2011.

Related Topics: Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee

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http://www.blueridgeonline.com bheafner

Hi Matt, just read your article on Google finally contacting webmasters when they see red flags while crawling websites, bravo this is greatly needed and has to be a tremendous job and huge expenses to better the WWW for us all. I as read what Google considers Cloaking (pasted below) is misleading totally contradicting to what the latest copy of Microsoft Expressions built in SEO Tools suggest in fact it shows as an error on your webpage while building. How long will it take and how many companies are going go under until we come to a standard SEO practice like 802.11g rule it affects everyone doing business on the Internet and yet the only people who pay are the mislead webmasters like myself. Please look into this I would love to know how both Microsoft and Google would answer my question it would also make a great article.

Sneaky JavaScript redirects
When Googlebot indexes a page containing JavaScript, it will index that page but it cannot follow or index any links hidden in the JavaScript itself. Use of JavaScript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of JavaScript with the intent to deceive search engines is not. For instance, placing different text in JavaScript than in a noscript tag violates our Webmaster Guidelines because it displays different content for users (who see the JavaScript-based text) than for search engines (which see the noscript-based text). Along those lines, it violates the Webmaster Guidelines to embed a link in JavaScript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees. When a redirect link is embedded in JavaScript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot, and can take a visitor somewhere other than where they intended to go.