When I speak to audiences, I sometimes get questions about how a search marketer would ever know that something is wrong. If you hired the wrong search optimizer and your site has problems, why doesn’t Google tell you what’s wrong? Now they can.
There aren’t a lot of details yet, but Google is using Webmaster Central to communicate with site owners. So, we’ll see exactly what Google decides to personally contact people about, but their blog talks about contacting site owners for violations of their terms of service (search spam), such as using hidden text.
Google says they will expand the kinds of communications they provide through their Webmaster Message Center in the future. Marketing Pilgrim has a few good suggestions of what they should tackle next.
Something else that is very helpful is a simple understanding of which pages you have indexed (and which ones are blocked). Yahoo! Site Explorer is very helpful for that.
Between Google’s and Yahoo!’s tools, Webmasters have far more information than ever before about how the search engines view their sites. If your Webmaster is not taking advantage, alert them to do so today.
