Google’s Matt Cutts says webmasters can expect Google to expand the amount of info Google provides in Webmaster Tools messages related to manual web spam actions. Cutts put out a new Webmaster Help video today discussing this topic, when asked:
Will Webmaster Tools ever tell us what links caused a penalty?
“First off, remember, algorithmic things are just ranking, so they don’t generate messages in Webmaster Console,” Cutts responds. “However, if you log in to the Webmaster Tools Console, and you see that there’s a message, that means that there has been some direct manual action by the web spam team that is somehow directly affecting the ranking of your website. So in those cases, right now, some of those messages have example links or example URLs that are causing issues for us.”
He continues, “We wouldn’t necessarily say that those are the only things because if you have a million URLs that are offending things, we couldn’t send all million URLs in an email or even a message, because that’s just gonna take too much storage, but we are going to, over time, give more and more information in those messages, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if you see, you know, 1, 2, 3 – some number of example URLs or links that give you an idea of where to look in order to find the sorts of things that are causing that particular action. So, I think that is really useful. We’re going to keep looking at how we can expand the number of example URLs that we include in messages, and I think that will be a great thing for webmasters because then you’ll have a really good idea about where to go and look in order to help diagnose what the issue is.”
This is actually the second time Cutts has discussed this topic in a Webmaster Help video this month. Back on the 15th, Google released a video in which he also said they’d try to get more examples of bad links in messages to webmasters.
You can check that out here, if you want to see exactly what he said then.
