Update on penalty notifications

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

First, a brief recap: In late 2005, we started
emailing webmasters
to let them know that their site is violating our
Webmaster Guidelines and that we have temporarily removed
some of their pages from our index. A few months ago we
put these emails on hold
due to a number of spoofed messages being sent from outside Google, primarily to German
webmasters. Then, in mid-July, we
launched Message Center
in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners.

While Message Center is great for verified site owners, it doesn’t allow us to notify webmasters
who aren’t registered in Google’s
Webmaster Tools.
For this reason, we plan to resume sending emails in addition to the Message Center notifications.
Please note that, as before, our emails will not include attachments. Currently, the Message
Center won’t keep messages waiting if you haven’t previously registered, but we hope to add that
feature in the next few months. We’ll keep you posted as things change.

Written by Ben D’Angelo, Search Quality Team