About those fake penalty notification emails

Category : Google | 341 views | 2007-05-10 06:43:00

(This post was translated from our German webmaster blog, originally written by Stefanie.)

We are aware that a number of German webmasters have received fake penalty notification emails that allegedly came from Google Search Quality. These spam emails have created some confusion about their authenticity, since we send very similar email notifications, which you can read more about here. Therefore, we clearly want to state that these emails are not related to any of Google's efforts concerning webmaster notification.

Here are some indicators that allow you to identify these fake emails:
Note that the legitimate emails from us are sent from DONOTREPLY@google.com. However, there is a slight chance that the sender is spoofed as well. To be really sure you can verify the authenticity of an email examining the full message headers. If you look up the sender IP with http://ripe.net/ and you will find out through which provider the email was sent. The clearest distinction between fake and authentic Google emails is the sentence at the bottom of the fake emails saying "Anbei erhalten Sie ein Google Webmastertool um Ihre Seite erneut zu indexieren” ("Attached you can find a Google webmaster tool to get your site indexed again"). In addition, some of the emails contain an attachment with the following file name “google webmastertools.zip”; in other cases the malicious senders seem to have forgotten to attach the .exe file. To put our users at ease, the content of this file is just “cmd.exe c\:clear complete harddisc”. This is a rather bad hoax, as - apart from the syntax error c\: instead of c:\ - there is not a ‘clear’ command in DOS.The fake email does not contain umlauts, whereas our official email does.All the fake emails we know about mention redirects as the reason for the alleged elimination from the Google index. 301 redirects are not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.This message did not come from Google, so you can safely put the email where it belongs: in the trash bin. If you do receive a legitimate email from us, you can let us know that you've fixed the issues mentioned in the email by logging in to webmaster tools and filing a reinclusion request.