Google Webmaster Tools Now Emailing Website Owners Directly

Google Webmaster Tools has changed their policy, and is now going to start emailing web site owners directly if they detect critical or important issues with your web site. Before now, Google would only notify you about these issues via Google Webmaster Tools’ interface–and you had to log in to receive the messages.

Here is the email that Google Webmaster Tools sent out:

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 7:42 PM
To: Bill Hartzer
Subject: Email notifications from Google Webmaster Tools

Dear Webmaster Tools user,
We know that having a healthy and well-performing website is important to you. To keep you informed about your site’s status Webmaster Tools will now automatically send you a notification email if there are critical or important issues that we detect with your site.
We’ll only send you email for issues that we think have significant impact on your site’s health or search performance which have clear actions that you can take to address. For example, we’ll email you if we detect malware on your site or see a significant increase in errors while crawling your site.
For most sites these kinds of issues will occur rarely. If your site does happen to have an issue we cap the number of emails we send over a certain period of time to avoid flooding your inbox.
If you don’t want to receive any email from Webmaster Tools you can change your email delivery preferences at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/preferences.
We hope that you find this change a useful way to stay up-to-date on critical and important issues regarding your site’s health.
If you’d like more information about Webmaster Tools and building Google-friendly websites please visit http://www.google.com/webmasters.
The Webmaster Tools Team
________________________________________
© 2012 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

I have to admit that I have quite a few web sites that I am a verified owner of (mainly client web sites, but tons of other sites I own and manage), and it will certainly be interesting to start receiving these messages via email. It will definitely save me some time, although I usually log into Google Webmaster Tools daily anyway.

I applaud Google for making this change–it will definitely help some web site owners who don’t make it a habit of logging into Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis. I’m just surprised that it has taken this long in order for Google to start doing this.