Google - Notifying webmasters of penalties

Does this mean that sites not signed up to Google sitemaps are more likely to be penalised? Cutts writes that Google is testing notiying webmasters of spam issues with their site via the Google sitemaps webmaster interface.


Cutts writes somewhat confusingly as if the spam detection is done by humans carrying the inference that is done manually but it is Google , the entity, that contacts webmasters....

"if the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there’s no reason that we’d want the spammer to realize that we’d caught those pages. So Google clearly shouldn’t contact every site that is penalized–it would tip off spammers that they’d been caught, and then the spammers would start over and try to be sneakier next time."

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Notifying webmasters of penalties

Google’s Webspam team is working with our Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site. In my world (webmasters), this is both a Big Deal and a Good Thing, even though it’s still an experiment. Sign up for Sitemaps to try it out.

....as Google grows, we get more of a chance to “go back and fix things,” to build the ideal search engine. And part of doing that is having more and better communication with webmasters...