Updated at 4:45pm Google’s Matt Cutts posted on Google+ that the reason so many people are seeing these notifications is because they decided to also send them out when a penalty will NOT follow. Google is notifying webmasters of unnatural links pointing to their site even if the links will not hurt them. Shouldn’t Google’s message be clear about that distinction? Yes, but it is not and thus webmasters and SEOs are a bit concerned.

Here is what he wrote:

My big issue with this is that Google told us these manual messages are penalties and now they are no longer penalties. It is confusing in so many ways for webmasters.

Here is the remainder of the story I wrote this morning:

In July 2011, just about a year ago, Google first started sending out notifications of unnatural links pointing to your web site. Then in March of this year, Google ramped up this notifications and tons of webmasters received them.

It has been pretty quiet recently on this front, with only a few complaints per day in the forums about these notifications. But that all changed yesterday when tons of webmasters began receiving these notifications.

We have threads in most of the forums but here are some select threads at Google Webmaster Help, Google+ and WebmasterWorld.

Almost all of them plead innocence but the fact of the matter is, they received this notification and they most likely will see a downgrade in ranking within the week. This is a manual penalty that likely lasts 6 months or so and requires a reconsideration request to be removed before the penalty expiration window. Note, if you do nothing, the penalty will probably happen again.

Did you get a notification in the past day or so?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, Google+ and WebmasterWorld.