Google To Resume Webmaster Penalty Email Notifications

Aug 30, 2007 at 9:16am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced they will be resuming the emailing of penalty notifications to webmasters.

Google stopped sending these notifications when they learned that some people were using these notifications as a way to scare, spam and send viruses to webmasters. Soon after, Google launched a message center to notify webmasters who have registered with Google Webmaster Central about penalties that have been applied to their site, from within that system.

Not everyone is registered, of course. That is why Google has resumed the email portion of notifying webmasters of Google penalties.

How do you know if a Google penalty email is from Google? Google says that their emails will “not include attachments,” so any emails with attachments from Google on this matter are fake.

In the future, Google hopes to tell webmasters to login to Google Webmaster Central or register their sites with Google Webmaster Central to confirm and validate that their site has been penalized. But currently, if you register a new account with Google Webmaster Tools, old penalty notifications sent before you registered will not show up. Google hopes to change that to show past notifications, as well.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

Share, Bookmark & Discuss This Article
More:

See more stories like this in the Members Library! Check out the Google: SEO, Google: Webmaster Central sections of the Members Library where this story is filed. Members also get access to exclusive video content, a members-only weekly & monthly newsletter, plus more. Check out all the benefits!

2 COMMENTS ON Google To Resume Webmaster Penalty Email Notifications

Omadsense, August 31st, 2007 at 9:32 am ET:

Interesting, for that googles knows they still can’t do it right. Considering that it’s almost impossible to get a response from google when you want thier mistake corrected – they want us to respond to thier emails???? too busy.

rickvidallon, August 31st, 2007 at 2:24 pm ET:

Google touts that they want to have the best darn local search results around.

Problem is that their CRM or customer/ webmaster/ website owners relations management is non-existent. I am willing to bet my left eye that Google will send these emails AFTER they have penalized or punished a website.

~ CASE IN POINT ~
In May of 2007 I began sending emails to Google Maps (Gooogle Local Business) titled; How do I report an inaccurate business listing?

Google was pulling data from BOTH an old business listing and a new business listing. I was afraid to delete the old listing as it was some how connected to my new listing.

In August rather than help me, or answer my emails and posts Google suspended my local listing without provocation or warning.

This is what happens when you request help from Google. So for all of you out their who are asking Google to look into an inaccurate listing… think before you click.

Rick Vidallon
(Still waiting for an explaination from Google)

FREE DAILY SEARCH NEWS RECAP!