Google Improves Webmaster Penalty Notifications For Both Manual & Automated Penalties

By Barry Schwartz

Published: September 15, 2011 at 8:49 am

Google Webmaster SEO Report Google announced they have stepped up their webmaster communication for notifying webmasters of both manual and automated penalties.

In the past, Google let you submit reconsideration requests and then added that they received those requests.

Now, Google may reply if your site was affected by a manual spam action and that you are no longer penalized by that action. In addition, Google may tell you if your site is still in violation of the Google guidelines.

In addition, Google may even notify you if your site is not affected by any manual action, but rather of an automated ranking downgrade due to Google’s algorithms. Google said, if “your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.”

Google said they still will not send these notifications to all webmasters but they will be sending out more transparent and clearer notifications in the future.

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.