Webmasters have been wanting this for a long time, and it seems that some may have had their wish granted.

Matt Cutts says:

“If you don’t want to read the full post, the executive summary is that Google’s Webspam team is working with our Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site”.

Matt points out that not all webmasters will be contacted. Those who push the boundaries well into blackhat territory won’t be getting any advice from Google, however those who make the odd mistake may be contacted and alerted to potential listing problems.

Webmasters should be able to find out if there is a problem by logging into SiteMaps, clicking the Diagnostics tab, and looking for a message like this:

No pages from your site are currently included in Google’s index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we’ll evaluate your site. [?]
Submit a reinclusion request .

Nice one, Google. There’s a lot of detail in Matt’s post – well worth reading in its’ entirety.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Google Search, SEO. 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.