A Google blog post said that Google is now going to be sending out more transparent reconsideration request responses and notifications.
Let me quote Google before I get into why this all seems a bit unusual:
Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request. Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well. Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.
Now, this is all great. But is any of this "new" as in happening in the future or started happening within the past week?
I am not sure.
In June 2009, Google began responding to reconsideration requests, we even questions if they were automated or not a couple months ago. Earlier this year, Google began sending spam link notifications, telling people they don't have penalties and if they were doing really bad things.
Maybe it is now official? Maybe even more things are coming with even more specific notifications?
I haven't seen any new notifications reported in the forums, via email to me or on Twitter - at least not yet. Maybe this is just a post to say this is what Google has been working on over the years?
A WebmasterWorld thread has Tedster saying,
I must be missing something, here. Why this blog post now? It was just published September 15, but it's all about the changes in notification messages that are old news in my mind. Maybe it coincides with the new flood of "doorway page" messages and there are other new refinements to their messaging that we haven't noticed here so far.
Anyway, just a heads up and let me know if you do receive new notifications.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
