Why aren't penalized sites notified in Webmaster Tools?

JP from Los Angeles, CA asks:

"When a site is penalized by Google, why isnt a message sent to the owner via Google Webmaster Tools telling them how/why it was penalized? Currently, site owners are left grasping in the dark trying to figure out what they did to cause a penalty."

Recorded on April 23, 2009.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• penalty

[TheDrunkProducer]

That is total crap google you don't contact anybody you couldn't give a monkey's about anybody's website thousands or even millions of sites have probably gone bust because they have received a goolge penalty without any warning and explanation and of course no support to help them. Nobody goes out to get their website penalised on a purpose people make mistakes that's human nature but google doesn't see it that way you're a big bad evil monster to them.

[mattsoreco]

Sorry Matt, you don't. It happened to me without a warning. My site's is as far from black hat as possible.

[agapitoflores001]

Good question! It applies to me.

[SandySEOss]

All good websites gone out from your search engine,and I am getting only torrent results on google search..your recent panda update is worst,(9th sept)

Google panda is crappy and spoiling google's quality

[calculatorti]

@swtsinamon66

Submit a site reconsideration through google webmaster tools. State your reasoning for reconsideration. Google will review your site.

[calculatorti]

@TheDrunkProducer

In my experience it isn't that difficult to stay way from things that get penalized. If you have been penalized you probably did something to deserve it. If you do everything above board there is no reason for a penalty. You can even submit a reconsideration request through webmaster tools if you feel your penalty was unfair. Google isn't perfect but rarely do they penalize sites who haven't tried to do something shady.

[gazzerman]

Matt your failing on an epic level! In a bad economy, leaving honest businesses to fail is just plain wrong. At the very LEAST educate people in Google forums as they are like headless chickens. You need to tak a long hard look at this again and if you still think your doing all you can you should be ashamed of yourself.

[tagSeoBlog]

so the question is: when does Google think that my site is a good one? By Algo or manually? I think its a too simple explanation...

[fgults]

This message for Matt Cutts. In past other sites could not do any harm to your site by FFA or Link Farms or links from porn sites. But now anybody can make any harm to any site. Now inbound / paid links are causing Penalty. So I can harm your site. Now penalty became a business for some self claimed seo guys having tie up with Google. Google's new Penalty Policy is a mess and I think in future in next 3-5 years Google will loose its Search engine ranking reputation for this. Time will tell us.

[ROCKNTV1]

Why aren't penalized sites notified in Webmaster Tools?

[swtsinamon66]

matt my site doesnt use blackhat tactics... my site is the good guys. We did buy links back in 2008 I dont deny that. But honestly we didn't know. Every seo we delt with said we needed more links. Once we realized we weren't suppose to get paid links we got rid of all of them. We want our site to be in good standings with google. Why can't we given another chance? The last thing we want is to have a problem with indexing. Matt if you would review my site you would see we have made lots of change