Fake German Google Search Quality Team Warning from DONOTREPLY@gmail.com

Vanessa Fox of Google has confirmed this is not an email from Google and that these are fake emails. She said in a comment below, "The email you describe here did not come from Google."

I have seen a couple threads recently asking if the email address donotreply@gmail.com is a Google address. I did not know why people were asking this question until now.

A WebmasterWorld thread says that he as well as others have been receiving "Google Search Quality Team" emails warning of bans. Here are the characteristics of the email, as described in the thread:

(1) The email was in German.
(2) Many of the emails were sent out yesterday or today.
(3) Originating sender IP address resolves to an ISP in Spain.
(4) The email comes from DONOTREPLY@gmail.com and not from a google.com email address.
(5) Google rankings remain intact in both Google.com and Google.de.

Other people confirm recently receiving this email:

In Germany almost every webmaster has got one of those mails. They have been sent by using servers all over the world, the IP is not within Googles IP-range and the last sentence says that you'll find "a webmastertool" as attachement(!) which will easily allow you to file a reinclusion request after you fixed the mentioned problems with your site (a 301-Redirect!)...

It seems fake to me, I hope Matt Cutts sees this post and leaves us some official confirmation that this is not a Google email.

Why are these emails going out? Some suspect it was a virus email where the hackers forget to attach the virus. Or maybe some kids are trying to give people a hard time. We have seen cases of SEOs threatening banning if they don't continue to use their services, but this is different.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at May 10, 2007 7:54 AM Comments (7)

Comments

I got that mail, too. Published the mail on my blog.

Posted by Jojo at May 10, 2007 09:42

We do send sometimes send email to webmasters to let them know of potential violations to the guidelines, as Matt talks about here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-communication/

Those come from an @google.com address and never include an attachment. They direct the webmaster to our reinclusion request form with text very much like Matt describes in his post.

The email you describe here did not come from Google.

Posted by Vanessa Fox at May 10, 2007 09:51

Here is the text:

Sehr geehrter Seiteninhaber oder Webmaster der Domain
www.smart-it-consulting.com,

bei der Indexierung Ihrer Webseiten mussten wir feststellen, dass auf
Ihrer Seite Techniken angewendet werden, die gegen unsere Richtlinien
verstossen. Sie finden diese Richtlinien unter folgender Webadresse:

http://www.google.de/webmasters/guidelines.html

Um die Qualitaet unserer Suchmaschine sicherzustellen, haben wir bestimmte
Webseiten zeitlich befristet aus unseren Suchergebnissen entfernt. Zurzeit
sind Seiten von www.smart-it-consulting.com fuer eine Entfernung ueber
einen
Zeitraum von wenigstens 30 Tagen vorgesehen.

Wir haben auf Ihren Seiten insbesondere die Verwendung folgender Techniken
festgestellt:

*Seiten wie z. B. smart-it-consulting.com, die zu Seiten wie z. B.
http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/index.htm mit Hilfe eines Redirects
weiterleiten, der nicht mit unseren Richtlinien konform ist.

Gerne wollen wir Ihre Seiten in unserem Index behalten. Wenn Sie wollen,,
dass Ihre Seiten wieder von uns akzeptiert werden, korrigieren oder
entfernen Sie bitte alle Seiten, die gegen unsere Richtlinien
verstossen. Wenn dies erfolgt ist, besuchen Sie bitte die folgende
Webadresse, um weitere Informationen zu erhalten und einen Antrag auf
Wiederaufnahme in unseren Suchindex zu stellen:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/reinclusion?hl=de

Anbei erhalten Sie ein Google Webmastertool um Ihre Seite erneut zu
indexieren.

Google Search Quality Team
Kopie an: webmaster@mydomain.com

---------
Summary: Dear webmaster, your site makes use of techniques forbidden by our guidelines (301 redirects domain.com to www.domain.com), thus we'll ban you for 30 days. Please fix the issues, then open the attachment and use the program google_webmastertools.exe to get your site reincluded.

Posted by Sebastian at May 10, 2007 10:13

Hm... interesting, how come I didn't get one? Now I feel left out.

Posted by Allan at May 10, 2007 19:00

cool article,

thanks...

Posted by tech at May 10, 2007 19:46

Vanessa, thanks for stopping by to confirm that it's fake.

Posted by Matt Cutts at May 10, 2007 22:46

Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I'v just started to learn this language ;)
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo

Posted by RaiulBaztepo at March 28, 2009 20:27

Fake German Google Search Quality Team Warning from DONOTREPLY@gmail.com

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