Tuesday, August 26, 2008
As a follow-up to my recentpost
about how user reports of webspam and
paid links help improve Google’s search
results for millions of users, I wanted to highlight one of the most essential parts of Google
Webmaster Central: our
Webmaster Help Group.
With over 37,000 members in our English group and support in
15 other languages,
the group is the place to get your questions answered regarding crawling and indexing or
Webmaster Tools. We’re thankful for a fabulous group of
Bionic Posters
who have dedicated their time and energy to making the Webmaster Help Group a great place to be.
When appropriate, Googlers, including myself, jump in to clarify issues or participate in the
dialogue. One thing to note: we try hard to read most posts in the group, and although we may not
respond to each one, your feedback and concerns help drive the features we work on. Here are a
few examples:
Sitemap details
Submitting a Sitemap through Webmaster Tools is one way to let know Google know about what pages
exist on your site.
Users were
quick to note
that even though they submitted a Sitemap of all the pages on their site, they only found a
sampling of URLs indexed through a site: search. In response, the Webmaster Tools team created a
Sitemaps details page to better tell you how your Sitemap was processed. You can read a refresher
about the Sitemaps details page in Jonathan’s
blog post.
Contextual help
One request we received early on with Webmaster Tools was for better documentation on the data
displayed. We saw
several
questions
about meta description and title tag issues using our Content Analysis tool, which led us to beef
up our
documentation
on that page and link to that Help Center article directly from that page. Similarly, we
discovered that
users
needed
clarification on the distinction between “top search queries” and “top clicked queries” and how
the data can be used. We added an expandable section entitled “How do I use this data?” and placed
contextual help information across Webmaster Tools to explain what each feature is and where to
get more information about it.
Blog posts
The Webmaster Help Group is also a way for us to keep a pulse on what overarching questions are
on the minds of webmasters so we can address some of those concerns through this blog. Whether
it’s how to
submit a reconsideration request using Webmaster Tools,
deal with duplicate content,
move a site, or
design for accessibility,
we’re always open to hearing more about your concerns in the Group. Which reminds me…
It’s time for more Popular Picks!
Last year, we devoted two weeks to soliciting and answering five of your most pressing
webmaster-related questions. These
Popular Picks
covered the following topics:
- Susan
outlined a few ways to ensure your site is being indexed by Google. - John
answered some questions about spam reporting and reconsideration requests. - John also
wrote a blog post that is a great resource formetatags. - Wysz
provided some clarification on hidden text. - Matt
detailed appropriate uses of thenofollowtag.
Seeing as this was a well-received initiative, I’m happy to announce that we’re going to do it
again. Head on over to
this thread
to ask your webmaster-related questions. See you there!
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.
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