[epi0Bauqu]

Yeah, in retrospect I should have taken it slower and not gotten as close to the line in the first place. It's totally my fault, and I'm not bitter. As you can tell from the OP, I've had a lot of failure, and I similarly learned from this one.

[Matt_Cutts]

The tricky part is that the math works out something along the lines of there being ~200,000,000 domains and there being ~20,000 Google employees. At a simplistic level that works out to 10,000 domains per Google employee. Which means that even if Google stopped doing everything else and everyone at Google spent all their time talking to webmasters, they'd each have to answer 10,000 peoples' questions about rankings, how to make their site, whether they have ranking issues, etc. That's oversimplifying somewhat because there's lots of parked domains, but not too much--you'd be surprised how many people want to talk about their parked domains and why they aren't ranked the way they want. My team is vastly smaller than the number of Google employees, of course. And our first order of business has to be worrying about what users see when they search; talking to webmasters is the secondary priority.

The net effect is that we haven't found a way to talk 1:1 with every webmaster, and I'm not sure whether that's possible. The story of webmaster communication for the last few years at Google has been trying to improve scalability of the info. The earliest Google webmaster communicator ("GoogleGuy") answered questions on a webmaster forum. In 2005 I started a blog, which has the advantage of permalinks for posts like http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-autogenerated-doo... . We tried doing live webmaster chats, but that would only reach 400-500 webmasters at a time.

The most scalable thing I've found so far is making videos. Here's a video that came out last month about the dangers of autogenerating pages for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bgpWtVHo4 . We're at almost 300 videos now, and we're getting closer to 3M total views on our webmaster video channel. The hope is that this additional guidance helps people self-identify what can cause issues to avoid or to correct them without needing to talk to Google.

The other big tool that has been helpful is http://google.com/webmasters/ . That provides tools to identify the common errors/mistakes that webmasters make (crawl errors, 404 pages, canonicalization, robots.txt issues, identifying hacked sites using the "Fetch as Googlebot" feature, etc.). That helps with many of the straightforward issues, but of course it doesn't solve the issue with "sheer number of webmasters who have ranking questions vs. number of Googlers." If anyone has suggestions on how to tackle communication with webmasters in a more scalable way, I'd appreciate feedback on how to do better on that.

[epi0Bauqu]

I think the best scalable thing that you could do would be to generate a lot more useful automated warnings via all registered channels. And then have a process you outline somewhere on timelines and how to correct. I think the biggest hassle from the user perspective is it all feels like a black hole and black box.

I understand the argument behind keeping it a black box, but it doesn't need to be as much of a blackhole. For example, in this case the following could have happened:

1) Site triggers some alarm for violating something.

2) Just those site(s) get strongly penalized.

3) Automatic emails go out in the message centers of Google Webmaster tools, analytics, adsense, and Gmail -- wherever the sites show up registered. In my case, it would have been all of the above.

4) The messages indicate the nature of the violation, that there is a penalty in effect.

5) There is a link to click on if you think you've corrected the errors.

6) If you click it, it auto-checks your site in y days and sends you another message that it passed or not.

7) If not corrected, it stays penalized or there are a series of penalties until full blacklisting.

That's all automated, i.e. scalable. I understand there are some tricky bits about how much to reveal about why things were penalized and what not, but I think those could be worked around usefully.

[dfabulich]

Matt wrote a blog post about this http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/notifying-webmasters-of-penalt... and published a YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTI1TSmKmps

Google attempts to determine whether you deserve a warning; the goal is to notify honest folks, without notifying real "bad guy" spammers that they've been caught. Naturally, the algorithm gets it wrong sometimes... detecting wrongdoing is easier than detecting intent.

Were you blacklisted from Google Search or Google AdSense or both? Google AdSense's blacklist policy is totally separate from Google Search; Google AdSense's policy is to blacklist people on suspicion of wrong-doing (guilty unless proven innocent).

[AjJi]

I'm not about the "unless proven innocent" part in Adsense. It seems to me that when they think you're guily, that's it.

[epi0Bauqu]

Thx--just Google search actually.

[codinghorror]

First, Matt Cutts is awesome. I don't think this can be disputed.

Second, we're doing our part to spread what we're learning about running a top 500 website (Stack Overflow) with the community, in the form of http://webmasters.stackexchange.com

Do we make mistakes? You bet we do. Just the other day I accidentally disallowed all questions on Stack Overflow from being spidered in robots.txt. That.. was .. not a good day.

[Morr]

The videos are great. Also, webmaster central has a ton of great info.

However, I interact with a lot of customers who seem put off by webmaster central. It seems to be a very outdated interface. I understand it's important to be clear and concise when explaining these issues. But if you look around the web 2.0 world at people providing similar information there's a harsh contrast.

Put simply, webmaster central is small text with a dark appearance and little or no graphics. In my experience and testing this harbors a mentality of "This is too complex". Users seem to encounter long wordy pages with no graphics and convinced themselves it's beyond them, before they begin to read.

Making a page lighter and throwing in a few visual aids goes a long way in curbing this issue, as well as making the information easier to understand and more fun to read.

It seems like a small thing, but it scales to become overwhelming when you consider that most people who encounter a page like this and dismiss it at a glance start looking for an email us link or a contact phone number.

This is my experience anyway. Perhaps your results may vary.

[Matt_Cutts]

Morr, thanks for the feedback--I'm talking to that team in 45 minutes, and I'll pass on the advice. The webmaster console has evolved a lot through the years, but I'd be the first to admit that it's a lot of info on a relatively small amount of pages. Lately the philosophy has moved more toward "Let's try to set up the tools to solve the most common questions or problems that come up." That could work better than a passive panel of information that doesn't tell you what to do about all the info you see.

The idea is still percolating, but I think it's got a lot of potential.