Google’s Cutts: We Don’t Ban Sites Critical Of Google, But Here Is Why We Do Penalize Sites…

In the latest video from Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, he addresses Google’s standards for manually removing spam from the Google index.

Matt Cutts first said and repeated it a couple times within the video that Google will not penalize or ban a site that is being critical of Google. Matt said:

“One thing that we don’t do it is just say or someone has been critical of Google, therefore take action. We’re big believers in the Voltaire saying of I might not agree with what you say but I’ll defend to death your ability to say it. So just because you’re critical of Google that’s not the sort of thing where we’re gonna mark your site as spam.”

Outside of that, Matt outlines how Google makes sure they are consistent as possible when they take manual action. They include:
Google has very clear webmaster guidelines

• Most manual penalties are indeed “clear cut cases” and easy
• Google has training sessions
• Google has “shadowing” to train new team members
• Google will always review new manual penalties set by new Googlers
• They do random spot checks for quality throughout the database
• There are philosophical questions in the spam gray zone where they work together as a team to come to a consensus.
• Google is not bound by a narrow view, they look at the whole holistic picture. Such as looking at repeat spammers, malware cases and so on. Anything that is counter to the spirit of the guidelines, they will act on them.

Here is that video:

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Barry Schwartz

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 can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.