Google’s Webmaster Tools is supposedly a communication channel between webmasters and the search engine. As Vanessa Fox said back when it was just called Sitemaps: “Our goal is two-way communication between Google and webmasters.”
Although anyone who uses the tool is probably already aware that this goal was not achieved, a rundown of how a penalized site is represented in Webmaster Tools is perhaps interesting.
The site:
lost its rankings several months ago (outside top 30 for its own name);
lost its visible PageRank later;
is still included in the index and receives traffic from Google.
Message Center
Empty, ever since it appeared. Probably the small inconvenience of being out-penalized from view was not deemed important enough to communicate about.
Top search queries / Top clicked queries
These tables are the only segment of Webmaster Tools that actually mirrors the woeful state of the penalized site. Mostly uninspiring queries with positions #5-10, and a couple of relatively exciting ones, unfortunately with positions #40-70.
Crawl stats
In spite of visible PR being comprehensively zeroed out, PageRank distribution is diligently reported to this very day as well as “Your page with the highest Pagerank”. This last data can be out of sync with toolbar PR for an extended period even in the case of unpenalized sites.
Pages with internal links
An interesting aspect is that not a single page that was created (and internally linked to) after the penalty kicked in shows up in this list. Basically, Webmaster Tools does not acknowledge the existence of any new pages since that point; although those pages got crawled and indexed. Helpful, indeed.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps re-submitted still get downloaded instantly and quite regularly thereafter.
Set crawl rate
Googlebot activity is as strong as ever. Not that it mattered even before the penalty, anyway. Google’s cache offers 2-8 week old copies although “Number of pages crawled per day” implies that on average the whole site is re-crawled every 2-3 days.
Other data
Pages like “What Googlebot sees”, “Pages with external links”, “Diagnostics” etc. are regularly updated.
Business as usual, according to Webmaster Tools
The complete lack of communications about a penalty is especially frustrating when a site owner does not even know why the site was pushed back in Google. Almost every bit of information that comes from the console suggests all is OK when the opposite is painfully evident in the SERPs and traffic charts.
Google obviously won’t want to educate spammers, but being in Webmaster Tools is a form of cooperation. So why not give webmasters at least a hint. Is it a technical issue? Is it suspicious-looking link patterns?
Without the slightest help from Google, an honestly operated site that happened to be the “statistically acceptable amount of collateral damage” during an algorithmic spambusting initiative might be left out in the cold forever.
Tags: google, Google penalty, Sitemaps, Webmaster Tools
