Monday, June 18, 2007 at 1:16 PM
A while ago, I posted in the Webmaster user group, looking for feedback on our Help Center and how we can improve the assistance we provide to our webmasters. And wow, did we get a a lot of feedback - both in the group and in the blogosphere. I'm amazed at the webmaster community and your willingness to share your thoughts with us: thank you!
Here's a selection of what we're hearing:
You want Help to be more discoverable
- It's not as easy as it should be to find the information you're looking for. You'd like Google to do a better job of surfacing the answers to the most common questions. The browse structure doesn't make it easy for users to find help, and sometimes search depends on users knowing exactly the right term to search for.
- You like the idea of context-sensitive help - on-the-spot assistance (often shown in a tooltip that appears when you hover over an item) that doesn't require you to click to a different Help page.
- Right now, it's not clear when new Help information - or new features - are added, and you'd like Google to look at calling these out.
You want Help to be more useful
- You'd like Google to look at adding videos and graphics
- You'd like us to providing the kind of information that's relevant to the average webmaster, who may not have a deep knowledge of SEO techniques. You're looking for good and understandable answers to common questions.
- You'd like us to expand the actual content, and do a much better job in explaining potential reasons why sites may have dropped the rankings.
What's next?
Well, over the next several weeks, we'll be working on lots of changes to the Help Center, both in its content and its organization. We'll be looking at all the feedback we've gotten, and we're taking it very seriously: believe me, I have a long task list for this area. But it can always grow: if you have some great thoughts or ideas, jump into the discussion, or just leave a comment right here.
13 comments:
I used the help system yesterday and when I couldn't find what I wanted I looked for an email address to contact you - nothing there. Why do you make it so difficult to contact you?
if the help would contain more examples, rather than abstract descriptions, it would be more useful too.
Why not add more simple and clear examples like PAMELA FOX (Google Team), does in her posts?
That would be extremely helpful, instead of just abstract descriptions...
Could you add creation & modification date stamps and version numbers so we know when something hase been changed. This could even be in the Meta data.
There seem to be a lot of sites creating optimization tutorials and programs. How about an SEO certification program through the webmaster tools in which webmasters can undergo training through Google and then become certified after taking the test and passing (kinda like the Google Adwords certification).
How about a re-inclusion request status report?
Hi,
How about a page that lists all my webpages and the cached date right there. maybe the site: command can be tweaked to do that.
What about the last date the page-rank was assigned to my site.
I'm not sure what "In external links to your site" is telling me. Can you clarify?
The Query Stats seems old, I know soemone type "al weis -baseball -met -third -fungi -bat" to get to my site, but its been there for months. Maybe put a date there also on when the queries were last executed.
Steve.
Hi,
Regarding the paragraph found on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361 in the "Little or no original content" section, the paragraph reads...
"Auto-generated content: Content generated programatically. Often this will consist of random paragraphs of text that make no sense to the reader but that may contain search keywords."
I have pages that are built dynamically. It lists active partners of ours and which EDI transaction sets they trade. Competitors of mine have many pages too, but their pages are not built dynamically, and their pages are exactly the same. And their pages place high in a SERP.
For example,
http://www.actdata.com/aafes-edi.htm
and
http://www.actdata.com/academy-edi.htm
are exactly the same except for one word.
My similar pages are,
http://www.dmovers.com/EDIPartnerInfo.aspx?EDI-Partner=AAFES
and
http://www.dmovers.com/EDIPartnerInfo.aspx?EDI-Partner=Academy%20Sports
When typing 'aafes edi', they show up 4th and I show up 80th.
My pages differ showing the reader which EDI transaction sets the EDI partner does. And my page points to their EDI site if they have one.
This pointer to their site is not a cheap way to get links, I think it is very useful for the searcher to find contact information and implementation guides (rules on how to trade EDI.)
To the best of my knowledge, my site is the only site that does that making it unique.
Thanks for listening.
Steve Burch
burchman519@gmail.com
I have been trying to solve a Verify meta-tag issue for several days. The help feature has not helped and I can't find a contact to reach out to. This is VERY frustrating.
Hello
I created a blog on the 19th June but it still doesn't appear on the Google search and it has some visitors and coments. Last friday I helped my sister to create a blog, it is still not finished and since yesterday it appears on Google. I've tried through help to understand what happened but I still don't know what I did wrong
Best regards
I'd like the ability to block files and folders that cause errors so I can spend more time working on my site than looking for weird errors. If I could choose for google to only go into my site one or two directories deep, it would save me a lot of work.
I would like to see understandable and short answers to my query and also providing videos on every question next to the question itself would be of great help!
Hi everyone,
Since several months have passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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