Google announced that it is now including examples of problems in its messaging to webmasters who have been hit with manual webspam penalties. Google’s Matt Cutts actually mentioned it in a Q&A session at SMX Advanced on Tuesday night, but now he has put out a Webmaster Help video discussing it further.
“I’m very happy to say that just recently, we’ve rolled out the ability to, when we send a message, to include more examples,” he says. “We’re not going to be able to show you every single thing that we think is wrong, for a couple reasons. Number one, it might help the spammers, and number two, if there’s a lot of bad pages, we’d be sending out emails that are, you know, like fifty megabytes long. But we do think it’s helpful if we can include a small number of example URLs that will help you, as a webmaster, know where to look whenever you’re trying to fix things and clean the site back up.”
He adds, “It’s much better than it was than even just a few months ago, and we’ll keep looking for ways to provide even more guidance and a little more transparency so that webmasters get [an] even better idea of where to look, but we’re just really happy that now we have the ability, when we send messages, to give you a few concrete examples.”
Cutts notes that it’s going to take some time to roll out, test, ramp up, etc. There might still be some cases where people aren’t getting examples.
