Google Pilots Quality Guidelines Program

Google has started to pilot a new quality program aimed at alerting webmasters when their websites are outside of Google’s guidelines. Matt Cutts, unofficial spokesman for Google, has an article on his blog outlining the new program.

The Google Quality Program for lack of a better name is aiming to inform webmasters about parts of their websites that they may not even be aware that are outside of the Google terms of service (TOS). A black hat SEO may have gotten a hold of their website and placed bogus pages or code on the website that the webmasters may not even know about.

For those who have had their websites drop suddenly in the rankings or drop out of Google’s index altogether and left wondering why, this may just be the ticket that some naive webmasters need to help them define the problem, so that they can track down and fix their sites. Cutt’s site also offers some tips for re-inclusion for those who have been dropped from Google.

Anyway, it’s good to know that Google is taking a customer-friendly approach in helping webmasters. It makes good sense and good public relations to give webmasters the benefit of the doubt and help those with legitimate websites who erringly hired the wrong person or company to get back into the Google index. Two thumbs up for a customer-friendly approach.