Wednesday, May 11, 2011
We’re pleased to introduce the Google Webmaster Team as contributors to the Webmaster Central
Blog. As the team responsible for tens of thousands of Google’s informational web pages, they’re
here to offer tips and advice based on their experiences as hands-on webmasters.
Back in the 1990s, anyone who maintained a website called themselves a “webmaster” regardless of
whether they were a designer, developer, author, system administrator, or someone who had just
stumbled across
GeoCities
and created their first web page. As the technologies changed over the years, so did the roles
and skills of those managing websites.
Around 20 years after the word was first used, we still refer to ourselves as the Google Webmaster
Team because it’s the only term that really covers the wide variety of roles that we have on our
team. Although most of us have solid knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other web
technologies, we also have specialists in design, development, user experience, information
architecture, system administration, and project management.
In contrast to the Google Webmaster Central Team—which mainly focuses on helping webmasters
outside of Google understand web search and how things like crawling and indexing affect their
sites—our team is responsible for designing, implementing, optimizing and maintaining Google’s
corporate pages, informational product pages, landing pages for marketing campaigns, and our
error page. Our team also develops internal tools to increase our productivity and help to
maintain the thousands of HTML pages that we own.
We’re working hard to follow, challenge and evolve best practices and web standards to ensure
that all our new pages are produced to the highest quality and provide the best user experience,
and we’re constantly evaluating and updating our legacy pages to ensure their deprecated HTML
isn’t just left to rot.
We want to share our work and experiences with other webmasters, so we recently launched our
@GoogleWebTeam
account on Twitter to keep our followers updated on the latest news about our projects, web
standards, and anything else which may be of interest to other webmasters, web designers and web
developers. We’ll be posting here on the Webmaster Central Blog when we want to share anything
longer than 140 characters.
Before we share more details about our processes and experiences, please let us know if there’s
anything you’d like us to specifically cover by posting in our
forum or by
tweeting @GoogleWebTeam.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
Related services