2018, celebrating our global Webmaster community

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

2018 has been a very important year for our webmaster support community. What has happened?
There’s been a program rebranding, a global summit, and loads of community hangouts.

In October, the former Top Contributors became Gold Product Experts, and the Rising Stars, Silver
Product Experts. This rebranding happened throughout all of the
product forums and
these are some of the
new badges and names:

–
Silver Product Expert: Newer members who are developing their product knowledge

–
Gold Product Expert: Trusted members who are knowledgeable and active contributors

In November, we invited all of our Gold Product Experts from
every Google help forum
(such as Blogger or Business Profile) to a global summit. This meetup happened in the Google
campus in Sunnyvale, California. Out of the almost 550 attendees from all over the world, around
70 were Webmaster Gold Product Experts. Coming from 25 different countries, this was the second
biggest community that attended the event. Later that month, another very successful meetup took
place in Moscow, gathering 23 Russian speaking Product Experts (of which 10 were Webmasters).

Many of the attendees acknowledged that this “was a really valuable time”, that the “sessions were
very insightful and interesting” and that “the entire event was fantastic!”.

This knowledgeable group of super users provides invaluable help in 16 languages to more than 2
million users a year, about everything related to Search, Structured Data or Search Console in the
forums.

And what is the profile of our community? Many of our Product Experts (Silver and Gold) are site
owners who started out on the Webmaster forums (some more than a decade ago) by asking questions
about their own sites. After their issues were fixed, most of them stayed to give back to the
community, as they realized that their expertise could be of use to others. We want to thank all
of our experts for their dedication and constant knowledge sharing to help users who are having
trouble with their websites.

Throughout the year, we’ve held 75 live office hours hangouts on the
Webmaster YouTube channel,
in English, Japanese, German, Hindi, French, and we’ve also kick started the calls in Spanish. On
those hangouts, anyone can raise their questions to the Google team directly and interact with one
another.

If you’re interested in joining the community, meeting everyone and helping other users on the
Webmaster forums,
you can learn more on the
Product Experts program website.
We are always excited to meet users from diverse backgrounds and skill-sets!

Looking forward to what 2019 will bring to our community… And looking forward to meeting you!

Written by Aurora Morales, Trust and Safety Outreach team