Matt Cutts, Google employee/blogger, is reporting that Google will begin notifying SOME webmasters of penalties they may be receiving from Google for spammy content, thus keeping their sites out of the Google index.

I think it’s a great idea from Google. And they way Matt explains that some, not all, sites will be notified makes perfect sense.  I would imagine, though, that there are so many unintentional mistakes that webmasters make that it will be impossible for Google to actually notify all well-meaning webmasters and/or police who gets notified and who doesn’t… It’s technically just a “test” right now and it’s a great move in the right direction.

The notifications will come via the Sitemaps interface, which has evolved from a simple submission tool into a full-blown webmaster toolkit.  Matt and some folks from the Sitemaps team did a great presentation on Sitemaps at Pubcon last week in Boston.  If you’re not already using the Sitemaps interface, you ought to be.  Note, however, that Matt states that this is just a test and, “if you don’t see a message in Sitemaps, it doesn’t mean that there’s not a penalty. Right now, we’re not telling every site that has a penalty about it. If you bought the site 3 months ago and still aren’t seeing any pages in Google, it’s possible that it does have a penalty.”

Here is Matt’s post:

Notifying webmasters of penalties


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