Google is going to become more of a resource and advisor to websites when it sends messages for manual webspam actions, according to latest Google Webmaster Help Channel video by Matt Cutts. Armed with better information, marketers can take the steps necessary to improve the SEO value of their sites and regain visibility for their branded content.
Cutts says the search engine is making a concerted effort to provide webmasters with actionable, concrete details about website issues. This change was made in response to a number of requests, some involving websites that received messages about a handful of pages – or even just one – that had been defaced. This left webmasters to sift through hundreds or thousands of pages to determine which URLs were the culprits.
It’s already better than it was a few months ago, Cutts says. Google now provides webmasters with a few examples in its messages, but it might take time to roll this function out completely.
Still, Cutts cautions publishers that Google won’t give out too much information, so they can’t rely solely on the examples for their SEO success.
“Now, we’re not going to be able to show every single thing that we think is wrong for a couple of reasons. Number one, it might help spammers and number two, if there’s a lot of bad pages, we could be sending out emails that are like- you know- 50 megabytes long,” Cutts advises.
This seems to be part of the search engine’s plans to become more transparent – a value that it’s increasingly pressing on publishers, too. Brafton also covered Cutts’ previous guidance to webmasters, in which he said Google is working to make the internet a less anonymous place by weeding out spam and rewarding quality, relevant web content.
