The next large brand to be penalized by Google is Sprint, the large U.S. wireless provider.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has Kent Van Deusen, the Sprint website support representative, asking where is this “user-generated spam” on Sprint.com?

Before you get all excited that Sprint.com is penalized and banned from Google, stop. They are not.

This is exactly like Mozilla’s penalty and the BBC penalty. All three of these sites had/have very granular penalties, in the Mozilla and BBC case, only one specific page was penalized out of all their millions and billions of pages.

With Sprint’s web site, it is likely the community discussion forum that was hit and probably only very specific forum threads.

Google has not responded to Sprint about this penalty and I am not sure if they will.

Clearly this continues to show how scary and misdirected some of these Google Webmaster Tools notifications can be. That being said, Google does say they will improve them this year. So hang tight on that.

What should Sprint do? They should probably nofollow any links that were generated by non-official reps. Or hire an SEO company to dig into the details here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Google’s Matt Cutts did reply in the forum thread saying: