It looks like Google is now sending out “You’re Banned for 30 Days” notices to sites that are deemed to have certain levels of quality content, but that violate aspects of Google’s guidelines. Via Search Engine Forums and Threadwatch

Example slightly edited of specific names:

From: Google Search Quality DO NOT REPLY
Date: 8 September 2005 23:10:04 BDT
To:  admin at domainname.com,  technical at domainname.com,  webmaster at domainname.com
Cc:  hostingcompany at domainname.com

Subject: Removal from Google’s Index

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

And a post from Matt Cutts of Google on Threadwatch:

“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.”

A reply from Danny Sullivan

Matt Cutts again on Threadwatch:

One of the benefits in my mind is that it helps get the word out to avoid a certain technique (e.g. lots of doorway pages that each do a sneaky JavaScript redirect).

Danny makes a good point in his write-up; we didn’t have resources to do this before. And right now we’re not emailing very many people as we explore this. But it’s important that we’re opening up some communication. We’re trying to do it scalably, but it’s two-way because we give specifics on what was against our guidelines, and where to go to file a reinclusion request to communicate with us. I like that part of it.

To be honest, Danny had a lot to do with this. He has always prodded us about how we should offer “what happened to my site?” info, even if people had to pay for it. I never wanted anyone to have to pay for that info, because it seemed like a conflict of interest. But the seed was planted, and so we’re always thinking about ways to help regular site owners without giving a huge advantage to spammers. This seemed like a nice step.

We all know Google likes to solve things “algorithmically” so how many “good” sites will get caught in this filter? At the same time, it’s promising that Google is now making an attempt to notify sites of any search spam screw ups. But notifying the web host in the CC? Is that necessary?

Tags: search optimization, Google, search spam, banned from google