30 May 2006 | Author: Jonathan Scott

Google's webmaster console - Google gives webmasters console control

If you knew something useful or could help solve a problem easily you would do your best to help, right? What if you are the world's leading search engine and you deal with billions of websites and businesses? Is it the law of the jungle and survival of the fittest? Should you just let natural selection take its course...

Ever since I can remember, Google has been about users not webmasters but times, they are a-changing. Google is moving towards a Google Webmaster Console. A Google Webmaster Console? - it's a place for Webmasters to log in; a place for webmasters to view Google-related website information; a Google console and a place that enables webmasters - or webmaster authorised users - to view site information. Essentially, it's a console that offers more control and detail for webmasters.

An ideal search engine should have a level of service to offer to both users and content providers. The Webmaster Console takes control closer to webmasters and, in turn, could provide a better search experience overall. In this initial article, the second to follow next week, we have a look at Google motivation to contact Webmasters and the current console. We also speculate on what the Google Webmaster Console might look like in the future.

First Matt Cutts. The Google guru posted an article about notifying webmasters of penalties through a console. There he makes some key points about Google Webmaster communication:

"I believe the ideal search engine would help site owners debug and diagnose crawl problems, and the Sitemaps team has made great strides with that in Google's webmaster console. But I think the ideal search engine would also tell legitimate site owners when they risk not doing well in Google."

Google wants sites and site users to know about potential violations of Google's webmaster quality guidelines.

However the console won't be specific, it will more likely notify webmasters generally about an issue - this notification is taken from a variety of potential issues.

• Q: Are you going to show every penalty for a site in the webmaster console?
• A: No. Our program to alert webmasters by email has been successful, and this new program is a natural extension of that, but we're still testing it.

In the webmaster console, once you verify a site, click on the tab labelled 'Diagnostic' and navigate to one of the page sections called 'Indexing summary.' The specific text will say:

"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 reinclusion and we'll evaluate your site."

Indeed, over the last few months Google have been contacting webmasters and site owners via email. Google Contacting Webmasters by email is not a bad start but there are some limitations.

"The way that we've been tackling better communication over the last few months is by testing a program where we try to email some penalized sites that we believe are legitimate. The issue is that it can be hard to contact a site by email: some sites don't give any way to contact them, and some sites don't receive/read/respond to the emails that we send. Overall, the experiment has been very successful, but email has definite limitations."

Slowly, it seems, Google's ability to give Webmasters more information through a console is coming alive. Information for webmasters from Google servers is a step towards meeting in the middle. So the Webmaster Console, part of Google Sitemaps, will collate technical information for a webmaster and presents it in a friendly co-operative manner.

Next week we'll look at what the Google Webmaster Console might feature in the future, and how this will help sites gain more vision into Google's vision of them. Until then, I've been your resident big mouth. Media no object.

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