SEO Junkie

Google has recently been sending email notifications about penalties to the concerned webmasters. Now it has incorporated it with ‘Google Site Maps’ and added many new features like.

• Report spam
• Reinclusion request
• Indexing Summary
• Crawl Errors
• Add A Sitemap
• Query Stats  
• Crawl Stats
• Page Analysis
• Index Stats
• Top Search Queries
• New Help Center

Accorting to Matt Cutts,

The Webspam team and the Sitemaps team have been working together for several months on a new approach: we are now alerting some sites that they have penalties via the webmaster console in Sitemaps. For example, if you verify your site in Sitemaps and then are penalized by the webspam team for hidden text on your pages, we may explicitly confirm a penalty and offer you a reinclusion request specifically for that site.

I’m really happy about this new way to communicate with webmasters, even though it is a test for now. If the initial results are positive, I wouldn’t be surprised to see us gradually broaden this program.

The catch is that Google won’t be informing each and every website which is penalized as Matt further pointed out:

Our program to alert webmasters by email has been successful, and this new program is a natural extension of that, but we’re still testing it. We are not confirming every site that is penalized for now, and I don’t expect us to in the future.

After all, the ideal search engine should help site owners debug and diagnose crawl problems and tell legitimate site owners when they risk not doing well.