Google Shows Black-Hat SEOs The Penalty Card
Have you been using black-hat techniques, javascript redirects or web page generating software on your website? Well, you might just be the next recepient of a letter from Google, like the one posted on the Search Engine Journal site.
It markes the beginning of Google’s New Webmaster Communications Initiative. To put it simply, Google will now send you a warning letter, advise you to remove the offending pages, and impose a 30-day penalty on your site, to give you time to clean up your act.
According to Google engineer, Matt Cutts (book mark his blog for more news on this),
Google is trying out a pilot program to alert site owners when we’re removing their site for violating our guidelines. JavaScript redirects are the first trial, but we’ve also sent a few emails about hidden text, I believe. This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that “Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95? software was doing. Personally, I think opening up a line of communication to let webmasters know when we’re taking action is a really good thing–a site owner doesn’t have to guess about what happened. But again, we’re starting with a trial program.
This is good news for the SEO industry. It marks a turn in Google’s non-communicative stance and makes it less frustrating for webmasters to communicate with them. Besides even black-hats deserve a second chance, no? 
Now, will Yahoo follow suit? Let’s wait and see…
Read the posts on Threadwatch and the Search Engine Watch Forums for the complete story.
