Google Webmaster Central is a very valuable resource and looks to continue to give us important information regarding our websites in the Google index and actually gives us insight into how the Googlebot interacts with our websites and their contents.
In 2005 Google began sending notifications to webmasters to notify them that their websites were outside the published webmaster guidelines and because of this, some/all of their pages were removed from the index. Of course, this was used by others to spoof the notifications and get webmasters in a tizzy, so they stopped sending them and looked for a better way.
Back to the drawing board. In July 2006 they launched Message Center to help get the notifications to website owners without the threat of others sending “false notifications.”
So today they announced the new plan to help those not verified:
…we plan to resume sending emails in addition to the Message Center notifications. Please note that, as before, our emails will not include attachments. Currently, the Message Center won’t keep messages waiting if you haven’t previously registered, but we hope to add that feature in the next few months. We’ll keep you posted as things change.
Will this be well received, or is this an attempt to get more website owners to “verify ownership” with Google? That remains to be seen. However, this will probably get the pranksters back into their chairs to start up the fake emails again.
What do you think, should Google even be concerned with websites that are outside of their published guidelines?
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