Google Becomes Proactive in Search Engine Optimization Violations

Last September, Matt Cutts blogged about a pilot program that would alert Webmaster via email about issues on their site that may get them penalized.

This is a great plan. USWeb fields many calls from people who have triggered off a red flag at Google, and are now suffering the consequences. Keep in mind, Google wants your content in their search engine. They need content, or people will not use Google. But, Google visitors must have a good experience. This is what Google is trying to make happen by filtering out Spam sites.

This new program should allow Google to better communicate to websites that they may have (however unintentional) triggered of a violation alarm in Google’s algorythim.

You can view a sample email below:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.chefrevival.com.au/,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your
pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines,
which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently
pages from http://www.chefrevival.com.au/ are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:
On http://www.chefrevival.com.au/, we noticed the following hidden text: “Chef Revival Chef Uniforms - A range of stylish, comfortable and durable chef uniforms designed to withstand the pressures of today’s kitchens, Chef apron Chef Jackets Chef Pant Chef trouser Chef headwear Chef Apron Chef Shirt Chef Neckties, Chef aprons Chef Jackets Chef Pants Chef trousers Chef headwears Chef Aprons Chef Shirts Chef Neckties, traditional check chefwear clothes”

We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be
reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our
quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion
request at http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and
then “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in
ranking,” click Continue, and then make sure to type “Reinclusion
Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Matt Cutts goes on to make clear that this program is not for the blatant Spammers who are auto generating thousands of pages. Google will pay them the compliment of assuming they know what they are doing.

The primary point of this program is to help websites that may have just been given some bad advice. This is a win-win for everyone, and a recent update from Matt Cutt’s Blog shows that this program is having good results.

google, matt cutts, SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.