Communication is good.

That’s the lesson Google is working on learning right now as they test out a system to notify webmasters of banning and quality issues with their website.

The emails, initially reported on by Nick W of ThreadWatch and later confirmed by Matt Cutts, are quite an interesting read.

Dear site owner or webmaster of [url removed],

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [link]

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from [url removed] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages: On [url removed], we noticed that pages such as [url removed] redirect to pages such as [url removed] using JavaScript redirects.

We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion request at [link]

You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and then “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking,” click Continue, and then make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Matt promises to have an update on his blog soon. Once he does, I’ll update this entry to link over to him. In the meantime, speculate away about all the possible ways this could be used for nefarious purposes.

Susan Esparza is former managing editor at Bruce Clay Inc., and has written extensively for clients and internal publications. Along with Bruce Clay, she is co-author of the first edition of Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies.

See Susan's author page for links to connect on social media.