Has Google lost sight of their initial ideal of ‘Don’t be evil’? Some are likely wondering these days. Well, at least when punishment becomes a blanket for everyone under suspicion in their eyes…

If you don’t want to read the full post, the executive summary is that Google’s Webspam team is working with our Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site. In my world (webmasters), this is both a Big Deal and a Good Thing, even though it’s still an experiment. Sign up for Sitemaps to try it out. Oh, and the Sitemaps team introduced a bunch more new and helpful features too. Check out the Sitemaps Blog for more info. :)

The responsibility of picking “Don’t be evil” as an informal motto is that everybody compares Google against perfection, not to our competitors. That’s mostly a good thing, because it keeps us working hard and thinking how we would tackle each issue in the best possible way. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the ideal search engine would communicate with webmasters.

There’s a Laurie Anderson song called “The Dream Before” based on a quote by Walter Benjamin. Part of it goes… Source: Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO