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

Barry Schwartz on March 5, 2013 at 9:19 am

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:

About The Author

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 SEM topics.