Updated messages for manual webspam actions

Matt's answer:

Hey, everybody. One of the requests that we’ve heard recently is to include more concrete, actionable information whenever we send a notification message out to a webmaster. So for example, we’ve seen a couple sites that had millions of pages that had a manual web spam action on just a very small number of pages. In one case, it was only one page, but they got a message that said, hey, you need to look out because some of your content has been defaced. And they didn’t know exactly where to look. And that’s a fair piece of feedback, and so we’ve been looking at how we can improve things, and I’m very happy to say that just recently we’ve rolled out the ability to, when we send a message, to include more examples. Now, we’re not going to be able to show you every single thing that we think is wrong, for a couple reasons. Number one, it might help the spammers. And number two, if there’s a lot of bad pages, we could be sending out emails that are like, 50 megabytes long. But we do think that it’s helpful if we can include a small number of example URLs that will help you as a webmaster know where to look whenever you’re trying to fix things and clean the site back up. So it’s much better than it was even just a few months ago, and we’ll keep looking for ways to provide even more guidance and a little more transparency so that webmasters get an even better idea of where to look. But we’re just really happy that now we have the ability, when we send messages, to give you a few concrete examples. It’s going to take some time to roll out and test, and ramp up, and there might be a few cases where people might not be able to get an example. But for the most part, we’re going to be trying to provide more and more information over time so that legitimate webmasters can know where they need to look to try to fix problems. Hope that helps.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: