Will Google notify webmasters of violations of the webmaster guidelines?

[DadsonFireORG]

Matt, please many of us work for ourselves and are barely making a living. The answers we understand have to be vague, but why cant we get an answer straight forward like YES we are building a bad link removal tool, or yes we know many of you are being bowled by your competition and we are NOT going to penalize you, or we will alert you on something important like that. Hacking is a great corporate term and such, but truthfully we need bread to eat. PPC is to costly for most of us Matt help us.

[BirminghamDan]

you got that right. i think matt wants to be a tv personality or something.

[LightningLewS]

The more SEO I have studied, the more I believe it comes down to attention to detail, know what matters, take a long term view and no shortcuts. Plus, make quality content that people will value instead of 'shortcut' spam that, like page latency, just slows us down and gets in the way.

[InsuranceSoftware]

Google does not launch attacks, I promise! I was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal criticizing Google for not responding to my issue in click fraud. Although I still disagree with their response, they never... not once! penalized my site for the article.

I disagree with their response to click fraud which is in direct violation of their own mission statement, but they are a business and have created a way for millions of writers and community activists to monetize their information.

[vivianrollins]

recently one of my pages got dropped off the serps which enjoyed about 100 page visits daily prior. however, the main page is still in the serps and as far as i can tell, the page is still in the index. this very page which showed up on the first page of google is now nowhere to be found. what happened and what the reasons are is unbeknown to me.

[blueyesmatt]

does a name of a dog fall under the copyright law?

[musicmaza]

Hi,

I posted a question 4-6 weeks ago but haven't heard back as yet.

Thanks

[almightyvegeta87]

Matt Cutts is not on Webmaster forum

I don't trust other guys

[ShapeShifter42]

This is a tiny step forward, although all such steps are welcome. It doesn't explain or justify "we won't tell the vast majority about their mistakes in case we notify the Bad Guys". This is not proportionate. See my blog post at Knowmysite for more details

[freekzero]

I'm not sure if the problem was entirely understood. It's not so much KNOWING that you are in violation (that's easy to spot via a big drop or removal from search results), it's knowing WHAT the violation is.

I've been party to this situation before (with Yahoo as well) and all you get is a "please review our Webmaster Guidelines". However in all cases the site was EASILY 100% compliant as far as we could tell. Whatever the problem was, it wasn't an obvious interpretation of the guidelines.

[manfmnantucket]

freek0, a big drop can easily be caused by things other than Goog punishments.

I can cite you clear cases (me for one) where folks lost thousands of $ due to the secrecy and lack of recourse, were not being penalized, but could not find out.

If there were a healthy search ecosystem, it wouldn't matter much since if any one engine dropped you it wouldnt be a biz-killer.

MS Does provide a 'Blocked' flag BTW.

Goog doesnt have to compete that way due to their size. I think Matt etc mean well

[Amagdy1]

Smart!

[manfmnantucket]

this is evasive. first the numer of penalty sites has to be far smaller than entire web. policy of judging someone to be a 'bad guy' and not notifying them preassumes guilt when it could be error... no recourse. this amounts to strongly anticompetitive monopolistic behavior, snince it forces SEOs to favor google and hurts cos too small to diagnose punisments

[rtsownage]

You criticize Google? :o

*A strategic nuclear launch has been detected*