Last Friday, Google announced, on the Webmaster Central Blog, that they have a new way of alerting webmasters about specific messages concerning their websites.
What were formally called "sitenotice messages" are now referred to as alerts and will be prominently featured in the message center in your webmaster tools. Not using webmaster tools? Well head on over to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and make sure to verify your account. Google want to help you rank properly in their engine and they provide a whole tool set for you to do just that.
The new alerts are an added benefit because they make it very easy to identify problem areas in your code or on your site that you may not even be aware of. Alerts may warn you about an increase in crawl errors, an increase in 404 errors, or about possible outages. Plus Google gives you many options to view your messages, or even receive the alerts via email so you can address them as soon as they are available.
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