Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 10:51 AM
Today we're launching our Message Center, a new way for webmasters to receive personalized information from Google in our webmaster console. Should we need to contact you, you'll see a notification in your Webmaster Tools dashboard.
Initially the messages will refer to search quality issues, but over time we'll use the Message Center as a communication channel for more types of information. Here's an example: informing the site owner about hidden text, a violation in our webmaster guidelines.
For our webmasters outside the U.S., we’re also pleased to tell you that Message Center is capable of providing information in all supported Webmaster Tools languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Korean, Japanese, etc.), across all countries.
Right now the number of sites we’re contacting is small, but we hope to expand this program over time. We’re also really happy that the Message Center lets us communicate with webmasters in an authenticated way. As time goes on, we’ll keep looking for even more ways to improve communication with site owners, but right now, why not claim your site in our webmaster tools so that we can give you a heads-up of any issues that we see?
64 comments:
It' nice to see Google taking the personal approach to helping site owners avoid accidental spam. I can't count how many websites I have consulted on that have used black hat techniques without even realizing they have.
Thank you Google!
Nice Idea.
Any chance of an RSS feed for this so we are alerted when a message is waiting ?
Reason I ask is that I only use webmaster tools a few times a month and would probably miss a time sensitive message.
Nice :) Instead of "no messages" you could say "Don't worry, you're not penalized", that would reduce the questions in the rankings section ;)
Well, I don't see any messages!
Don't you notify sites with the 950 penalty?
I'd be glad to fix the problem whatever it is!
Nice, but how do I contact you in case I think you should have contacted me because my site is listed as not reachable and therefore falls out of the index? That would be an even more useful link in the dashboard imo.
@Jennifer: Thanks!
@bwp58: I'll pass your suggestion along to the team.
@Sebastian: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...
@Robert, Torsten: If you have site-specific questions, please feel free to bring them over to our Webmaster Help Group where a lot of smart folks hang out, ready to help look into your site's issues in greater detail.
Neither do I? I just added my online indian tv www.watchindia.tv and still waiting for the initial index from Google. I heard Google does post a message at your account.
Hello Friends...............
Its a new and useful feature provide by Google for those who use Google webmaster tools.
http://onlinemarketingupdates.blogspot.com/2007/07/google-webmaster-central-adds-new.html
Susan,
I posted my site-specific question at the Webmaster Help Group several times, but nobody there is apparently smart enough to figure out what the problem is. I got no help there at all.
What good is the "Message Center" if you don't contact a site owner about a problem such as the 950 penalty?
That's what the "Message Center" is for isn't it?
Interesting. BUT, I'm now seeing "URL Not Allowed" errors, "this url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location".
I've been using my Blog's Atom.xml as a SiteMap, but also just implemented Blogger's new Feedburner re-direct option. That's the source of the problem, becuase I have Feedburner URLs in the Atom.xml now. Any thoughts?
This is a good step. I hope you can soon use it to notify those webmasters who have a penalty on their site, and can't figure out why. I'm 32 months now with a penalty, and am very frustrated.
Great tool, when should we start seeing messages?
I think this is a great idea, and makes people appreciate more the great services Google offers.
We just ran into this situation where our highly recognized ecommerce site that is functioning already for about 10 years, never had any problems before with our content, and suddenly got completely cut off from Google’s index, cant even search for our own domain name.
We did not get any message to what the reason is, all we got is,
“No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reconsideration and we'll evaluate your site.”
Needless to say our entire IT group is breaking there heads for the last few days figuring out what we did wrong to be punished so severely, and there is nothing we can identify as a cause to the problem.
We would greatly appreciate if we can communicate with someone about this problem and help us resolve the issue, whatever it may be.
I think this would be a Great tool for one to one communication
"Right now the number of sites we’re contacting is small, but we hope to expand this program over time."
Does that mean that either the messages or recipients themselves are hand chosen because the system is not automated enough to support all webmasters being notified?
If so, are plans to automate it the reason why it is hoped to be expanded in the future?
Lastly, what would be really nice, assuming it is not already, that one could potentially sustain a penalty but still be notified about it if they create a webmaster tools account after the penalty has been levied.
Craig
Wow, I'm waiting for message from u )))
I want to give a suggestion. I search so many times images and it shold be a link to skip the page of the pic and go directly to "see complete image" It'd help the performance, and improve google.
Hoping the information arrives to designers:
Javier mujica
Hi,
A very good update!!
Cheers,
Harini
I like this feature, but I'd really love the ability to submit a question to you. I tell my web designer to be "white hat" and I think they are. However, all my pages with a certain extension (hot topics) have dropped 5-7 pages as of late. If we are doing something wrong I'd like to fix it. I'm the company owner, but not a web developer and I trust my web designer to do things right. If there is any specific feedback you can provide it would be appreciated.
Regards,
Mike Helfand
www.findgreatlawyers.com
Hi,
As several of the above, I think that 2 ways communication is really needed. Our site has been in some kind of penalty for months now, without us knowing what is the issue, and how can it be fixed (needless to say that we never did any wrong as far as we know). the only way we see to contact google is using the 're inclusion request', but it is really not what we want too...and also for this, we never got an answer.
Noticed that when I sign out of webmaster tools, Firefox (2.0) gives me an error message....
'Connection reset'
Very weird. Might want to look into that.
I was trying to get into eBlogger. However, when I sign in using my gmail account, the page just keeps instantly reloading like it is in a bootp routine. What is going on?
It’s a great feature which I hope can be extended too all web-sites -large and small.
I hope it gives a webmaster enough time to respond to the message to cover situations such as holidays, domain transfers, illness etc.
Susan, as you were well aware of I was kidding, but reading the comments I'd seriously suggest that you change the post's title to "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...". Not that the majority of the audience would get it, but it could be funny reading the reactions in particular forums obsessed by numeric penalties ;)
[<~ ducks and covers]
Sorry for offtop, but there is a problem on russian version of this
page. Link at the end of the article is corrupted and goes nowhere. You can look at a screenshot here.
The link address is shown at the bottom of the picture.
Best wishes! :)
great new feature! I love it. Google getting personalized slowely and steadly.
Sachin Dhall
http://qtp.blogspot.com
Thanks for the great addition to a great tool. I'm excited to get my first message so I can correct whatever issue I may have so my SERP can improve.
When are you going to write this blog in spanish? The spanish people is waiting
The new feature are great, but there is something to improve IMHO about the web crawl area and pages not found.
You could certainly put an advice to alert user who manage sites that a specific page for an X site has not been found. Otherwise, periodically is necessary to browse through every site and do checks.
Also, the web crawl and page not found could be improved reporting the web pages that contains the misspelled link; this will avoid "debug" of web site looking for a page or a missing link.
In the last report I got for the latest web site, I've found (manually checking) just two broken links on 5 reported. And I'm not able to figure out where are the others. May be I fixed them during the updates, but I'm not sure.
Bye
Andrea - Web-MA
does anyone know the head email address to contact google?
Try here
Excellent initiative from Google. Definitely helpful for WBs.
/me goin to read messages )
This isn't the place to post this, but I'm not sure where else to try. My site, which has consistently had many thousands of links in Google has suddenly nearly vanished and has remained largely vanished for weeks.
I haven't made any significant changes to what I'm doing on my site and I had no problems of this magnitude with Google for years. All of a sudden, it almost looks like I'm blacklisted, but a few random pages on my site continue to be indexed. Where can I get help with this? I'd think that if I did something wrong that would warrant major punishment that someone would have used the message center to contact me, but I've got zero messages.
I have a program for creating sitemaps Sitemap Writer Pro 3.0 beta and it has a tool for notifying search engines like Google about a new or updated sitemaps, but after notification, i can't find information about that sitemap in my "webmaster tools" account.
Has Google received notifications in that case?
Don't hold your breathe guys. Google doesn't care about serious webmasters. They only notify idiots that have hidden text, or load their pages with keywords. If you have a good site that keeps within the webmaster guidelines, and you get a penalty, you are out of luck. Google doesn't care!. Don't wait for messages. They won't come.
I visited Google Webmaster Tools for the first time tonight in a couple weeks, and found quite a mess. Apparently, something has changed along the way. Or maybe it's my end. I had to go back and reverify almost all my sites because your system apparently doesn't like the way BlueHost's default settings handle something or other.
Anyway...the biggest problem is that you say you can't access my sitemaps, despite the fact that they are all right where they were before, when I submitted them and they were crawled successfully. Sometime about robots.txt files. But you provide very little help on the subject. I've tried a half dozen formats for robots.txt files tonight...and still your system is complaining.
I am all for high standards. But if you're going to be cranky about stuff like robots.txt files, can you do more than just toss us a couple links and tell us to figure it out for ourselves?? ;-)
Too bad they didn't contact me.
My homepage for gamerosters.com dropped off the planet on Google today.
I never received anything in the message center as to why.
Now I am going to have to lay off employees and everything... until Google tells me what I did wrong.
Someone at Google please contact me!
briankaldenberg@gamerosters.com
My first thought, similar to Torsten's, was; but how do I contact the Google Webmaster Tools Team?
The interface is so flipping buggy, that's it's nearly impossible to use, but there's no way to offer direct feedback. I experience errors every time I use the tools and would love to offer debugging information, but can't. A message center should be a two-way street.
This is a great feature. But I would also like to know how we go about contacting you.
Right at this moment Google is showing this for our title tag:
We're sorry but PetsBest.com is currently down for maintenance. We ...
The spider must have crawled during a minor update, the page was not down for long.
This is dramatically effecting our traffic to our site, how do we go about changing this info ASAP!
Man, I could use this right now! The thought of 2 way communication sounds nice but let's be realistic. With millions of sites out there, Google would have to hire a boat load of people to have engaging discussions with us Webmasters. I just want some indication of *WHY* my site is being penalized even if it's an automated canned message. I can take it from there. Google, please start the heavy rollout of this feature ASAP.
Again, this is great feature from Google as this will build more communication between Google and its users. It will not only benefit user in correcting something wrong on its site but will also help Google giving more quality results.
I left this message for Matt C. on his blog, but figure I might get a response from you?
Hi Matt…fyi was checking links in my webmastercentral and I noticed labs.darkseoteam.com had seemingly duplicated entire content of your blog? and they were shown as a link to me as a result of a previous post on your blog!? Not a backlink I’m interested in…Whassup? And also…where is a good place you might suggest for a question like this? Thanks and best regards… please feel free to contact me directly for more details and of course delete this post…hmmm. I’m seeing the suggestion to go to the forum…I’ll do that, but wanted to be sure you knew of your personal blog being duplicated…
I There a taht Google can warn a webmaster instead of penializing them with removal. Ive cleaned up my site spintradeexchange.com any ideas other then the reinclusion form?
Sorry I have a misplelled word. I was just hoping I can actually get a live person at Google Quality Search to NOT remove my site. I have fixed the violations. My site spintradeexchange.com no longer has hidden text.
The only problem is that Google continues to have one way contacts.
I just 30 minutes searching for a link, and email address, something to report a problem and I'm sufficiently aggravated enough to give up in frustration.
It's creepy how you guys hide your customer service contact information. It's nearly impossible to do business like this.
The problem I'm trying to report is that it's been a week since we have not been able to view external links to our site.
The error message is ridiculously inappropriate:
"Our system is currently busy. Please try again in a few minutes."
Well how many minutes are there in a week!?
Thanks again Google, for being so "cool"... and extremely difficult to deal with it.
@infamiainc: Our Webmaster Help Group is the right place to contact us with this type of report. Several users have already made us aware of the issue and we're looking into it.
Hi All!
It seems some of the powers that be at Google assumes that everyone is out to abuse them. Many of us are not "SEO" experts, or even claim to be good at it.
We sell lawn mower parts, not Viagra or time shares.
It is hard enough to compete with the ebay spam crap that Google allows without being whacked out of the search engine altogether
I have done nothing different on my site for months, and I have gone from front page hero, to being totally out of the index.
There are jobs and livelyhoods at stake here, this is not Juniors myspace account that is not being listed. I have 30 employees who may get laid off for Christmas...and for what???
I would much rather see Google as a business partner than a crap shoot liability.
I have received no messages about the problem, only a S.O.L notice in the webmaster tools.
As with most folks, I'd be glad to fix the problem, if I had a CLUE as to what it is.
Victor Binkerd
outdoordistributors.com
I am working on a pilot project attempting to use as many of Google tools together with other resources in creating affordable E-Learning. This would appeal to countries who cannot afford the luxury of servers and the expertise to maintain them. I will be presenting a paper on my project at an E-Learning conference on 13 Nov. 07 in Bali. Need ideas!
Prof. John Arul Phillips
Malaysia
Victor, I see you found our Webmaster Help Group, which is the best venue for anyone with specific questions about their site or their site's performance. Looks like you've gotten several good answers already.
Your censorship of Jon Swift is a shameful abuse of Google's public trust. Do you really endorse Johan Goldberg's swill?
As others here have pointed out, it's a shame that communication in "message Center" is entirely a one way street.
My console currently informs me that I don't have any content problems, yet my site does not appear in the top 1000 for the search term 'scooter batteries'.
This is very strange, as my site happens to be numero uno on MSN search for these terms and my site was as high as number 13 for these terms on Google as recently as November. However, just before the lucrative holiday season, my site vanished from all Google results for these terms.
I have searched and searched Google's site for a way to communicate to them about this problem. I have done everything I possibly can to adhere to their published guidelines for content.
I try altering the content every few weeks to see if anything changes.
Nothing Works!
Call me Mr. Penniless, Frustrated and Disappointed
My website has been panelized -60 for all the organic "keys words" that the website product offers, and I have never bought or sold links, I found a little problem with duplicates URLS to the same content which I have FIXED and that was a on honest mistake. My site is still panelized and I have no idea why, and have no idea what i did wrong or how to fix it. It would be very helpful if there can be a automated system where webmasters can receive automated messages "HINTS" from Google bots on the "Google Webmaster Central Message Center" why the site is flagged or the potential problems. This way webmasters can get educated with the new Google system and learn from mistakes so they can fix the exact problems and keep their websites clean. ITS BEST IF WEBMASTERS GET EDUCATED WITH THE NEW FAIR GOOGLE RULES, THIS WAY USEFUL CONTENT AND SITES CAN BE FIXED SO THEY CAN BE FOUND AND USED BY GOOGLE USERS.
How about the "intermittent" penalty? My site is always number one on MSN Live search for several of my keyword combinations, the main one being "scooter batteries". However, with Google, on a good day I am number 13 or 14 and on a bad day I am 54 or 64. What fun! I add substantial site content about once a week and never mess much with the home page. On good days I get orders. On bad days I yawn. Sometimes it alternates every freakin day. Sometimes its 55 in daylight and 14 in the dark. Arghhhh.
Today it's at 48.
Lil ol Gadfly me at scooterbatteries.net
I awoke today to find 6 messages from Google to inform me my site had
been completely removed from the index. Sure enough, it had been due
to an offending page which turned out to be a very recent blog post (I
use a wordpress blog).
I took a look at the post, and discovered that my site had been hacked
via XML-RPC and injected with credit card and finance spam nonsense,
but I didn't even get time to remove it (ie, the 9 hours I was in bed)
before Google crawled and wiped my site from the index.
I find this ridiculously unfair, because now I've been penalised
before I could take any action whatsoever. I removed the hacked posts, and
requested re-inclusion, but in the mean time I'm going to suffer. What
can I do to restore my site sooner, and what can I do to insure this
doesn't happen again?
I can't believe someone can take down my site like this with Google's help, it's NOT a spam site, just had one post hacked!
Sorry to hear of your agony. Welcome to the brave new world of Google, the worlds greatest search company.
Me
thanks for all
I know that Google can't comment on "per site" issues but I have a few general questions which I want to run past a member of the Google team... in particular, there are a few techniques which I have seen used by highly ranked sites which (to me) see borderline spam... but they seem to be doing the job, and so I'd be interested to get Google input on these.
I don't want to post these on the Google blog, or on the Google Groups sites as I don't want it to see like I'm trying to get other site owners in trouble.
Is there somewhere / someone I can contact to have a quick chat about these? If it turns out they are / are not spam then perhaps we / I could stick a post up afterwards to discuss the findings?
Thanks
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an answer on this one, Kessa.
Back in the early days of Google, they would individually respond to individual inquiries about things sometimes. They wrote back and told me about some hidden text I had forgotten once.
Nowadays, they actually try to prevent you from contacting them. You can click and click on their "help" sections and you will rarely find anything that that allows you to mail them directly about a question you may have. The exception would have to be adwords and Google checkout. If it involves real dollars and cents, all of a sudden they seem to have ears again...
PS: I think this blog's headline should be "Let us stonewall you about your site"
anyone agree?
Thanks Techdude.
Yeah, I guess in fairness to Google that they would get a mass of emails from website owners if they made it too easy to contact them...
... but that said, on the flip side many site owners (such as myself) want to get a bit more involved / active with Google for the benefit of their particlar industry as a whole.
For example - there are a few tactics which I've been watching with interest on a number of sites similar to mine (I'll mention no names :-) ) for several years.
Whilst I'm not suggesting they are doing anything wrong, they do use things which I have often felt go beyond "optimisation" and are often unnecessary / borderline spam.
However, these sites always rank really well on Google, and so it would be interesting to know if Google regard such tactics as "spam" or "optimisation"
By supporting a certain degree of open communication Google can help website owners who want to do things the right way and stop people from inadvertently over-optimising their sites.
Yes Kessa, I have been studying Google results for years too, trying like many others, to discover what is actually going on. And I have noticed, much as you have, that many of the top sites use some of the techniques specifically admonished by Google. Things like massive keyword stuffing and connections to link farms.
Google has suggested that we build our pages as if search engines didn't exist. Yet the highest ranked pages are built as if nothing but the search engines really matters.
Google gets to have it both ways, it seems. I guess when you are "God" you get to have it any way you want... and they certainly do, don't they?
Dear Google Team, I would be glad if there would be a communication... a short notice would help a lot... but I never received an answer till now.
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
Post a Comment