# About those fake penalty notification emails

Thursday, May 10, 2007


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](https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-communication/).
Therefore, we clearly want to state that these emails are not related to any of Google's efforts
concerning webmaster notification.

> [!NOTE]
> Updated: Because these emails are easy to mistake for authentic ones from Google, we've temporarily discontinued sending them as we work on ways to provide more secure communication mechanisms. We hope this will reduce confusion.


In the original post, we had listed the ways to tell if the email you received was not from
Google. However, as we've temporarily stopped sending emails about guidelines violations, you
can safely assume that any email you receive isn't from us. Note that the emails we sent did not
include attachments. In addition, some of the emails mentioned `301` redirects as being the
violation in question. Rest assured that `301` redirects are not a violation of our
[Webmaster Guidelines](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials). Note that we do provide information
about some violations in
[Webmaster Tools](https://search.google.com/search-console).
If your site previously violated the guidelines and you've made changes to fix it, you can let us
know by filing a
[reinclusion request](https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843).

> [!NOTE]
> This post has been updated to indicate that we've temporarily stopped sending emails to webmasters about guidelines violations to reduce confusion.