Google Webmaster Help Forum - Koti Ivaturi - Google India SearchMasters '09

Key Takeaways

alright good morning everyone at the expense of sounding repetitive I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all of you to our banglar office it's both a privilege and pleasure to be part of this first in your search masters conference and I hope that this is the first of many more calm alright thanks Paul for the you know small introduction as well as he said my name is Cody I'm part of the search quality team have been with the team for a little over three years now and out of the bunch of exciting things that I do at Google one of my most favorite part is being part of this forum and helping of his masters answered my questions and basically building a solid community around it and that's exactly what I'm going to talk about today so moving on at Google we love webmasters and I think Adam has put that point well across in his engaging talk earlier among the gamut of resources that we provide to our users these are some of my favorites webmaster tools right it allows you to look at your website exactly as Google sees it and that's tremendous information because it gives you access to some crawling issues that your site might be having with google bot and allows you to rectify it among the other tools that it also provides along with it we also have sitemap tools up again Adam talked about how important site maps are so we have a site Maps generator on code.google.com it's a Python script and you can customize it I'm sure most of you might be using it already but what we all we also have our links to some third-party tools that we think are really good at generating sitemaps as well again those are links available on code.google.com link as well so you would want to check that out as well yeah the next one is brand new in fact we launched it a couple of weeks ago we have our own channel where Googler guides around the world have put together some really information videos about webmaster and trips tips and tricks in fact we have two videos by Matt that's about the recent Canon the link canonicalization issue as well so you would want to check that out also I would request you to keep coming back to that because we would be adding more videos in future as well and we also have a 30 minute interactive tutorial again this is the essential webmaster 101 you could say because it has everything with a wot of a master would need to know before starting a website and how he wants to interact with Google so you would want to check that out as well and finally we have our webmaster help forum as well which is what I'm going to talk about today before I talk about it I'd like to take you guys back a couple of years on the timeline just to set the context about how we evolved as a group over the years june two thousand five where is when we officially launched google sitemaps group this was also the time when you know sitemaps was a brand new protocol not many people knew about it so we wanted to give support for that it was not an industry standard as yet we had supported tool excuse me two languages and we had few hundred users again primarily for the reason that not many of them really understood what are the significance of a sitemap file list so the discussions were fairly technical they are very few Googlers giving support as well but more importantly the scope was limited as in as this name suggests it was primarily regarding sitemaps and it was not really addressing the broader issues of indexing and crawling and that's something that we realized and in June and in 2006 is when google officially expanded its support charter and we've come to be known as webmaster central so a lot of things change with that as well sitemaps groups became the master help group over there and you know the sitemaps blog became a master central blog and a lot of good things actually transitioned in that phase what also operationally happened is from two languages which suddenly started supporting 15 languages and I will use a bass groove obviously because we broadened our scope we as I said the scope was limited earlier and now we started you know keeping an eye out for the general trends but also in general addressing the issues of indexing and crawling well so I use a based guru as well and of course we had dozens of Googler guides we have enough googler grades working in each language help group as well so user activity increase and obviously we needed more Googlers to monitor and build the community around it as well so we have more public Isis with remember this was also a time when the web dynamics generally were changing so fast the technologies were becoming easy to use and people with almost little to emitter experience were charting their own online experience and hence it basically became imperative to us to kind of broaden our scope as well and very recently in fact a quarter and a half ago we launched a new platform for our help group so in fact from the old school groups tie will be basically transition to the new forum style so basic what we call it today is the google webmaster help forum so operationally not much has changed but a tech on from a technology standpoint it's a huge change because as I said we moved from email list listings old school email listing types groups from to a new platform that we call the webmaster help forum and lot of issues that were hanging around groups were basically solved by this transition issues like you know it was not really efficient in drilling down to your question you know finding answers to your questions easily and also as I said it's extremely important for us to recognize our you know super users as we call the top contributors who are building our community reminding you that they are building basically helping out webmasters around the world in their free time and at free cost as well so we wanted a system that we could recognize our top contributors as well so that issue was also solid we'll have a look at that as well currently the status is that you know it's in transition for the other 15 languages as well but we launched it in in English and polish and you would see how it has actually hit the popularity charts I have a slide that that you like to see a later in the presentation so let's have a look at a new forum most of you guys know sypro news it's a popular technology portal it actually quoted saying that from a sheer technology and functionality standpoint google webmaster help has taken a huge leap forward and we're really happy that you know this was one of a goal and it's actually played out really well some of the features i could say our new forum is a question and answer based forum and as i said that most of you must have used groups before too it's really difficult for you guys to or not i would say really difficult but it was difficult for you guys to actually drill down to search and come down to a question where you really wanted your answers in so this actually changed because in the current forum you you can navigate and come down to the search is better and also you can actually navigate to the questions that have been answered before as well so it basically becomes searching for your questions much more easier and you have gmail like of features and functionality as well which means that you know for archived questions or your favorite questions you can actually start it and already maybe sometimes you can help out other users who have similar questions to point out to questions that have already been answered before so basically it's a much more efficient way when compared to before and most importantly as I was mentioning user reputations are prominently displayed and this is one of our top contributors his reputation is clearly displayed in terms of his status saying top contributor oops okay I just need to go to the slide what happen I use a reputation as you can see his reputation is top contributors who basically recognize people so the platform allows people to answer questions and users can actually vote saying whether the answer was best answered or not and depending upon that you can actually accrue some points and the more answers your question more questions you answer the more points you get your status of reputation basically builds up so this is one of our top contributors you can see the questions he is asked against the question answers a question see is actually answered as well all right so let's have a look at you know the forum itself and the reason I'm going to talk about the anatomy of the forum is to let you guys know what is the best way to make use of this forum and we'll have a look at that so this is how the new platform looks like as I said it's basically a question and answer format forum you have a search box there so you want to search for questions you have this high possibility that somebody already answered it so you would just want to search for it and get you get your answers much more quickly if you don't find it there then to the left you have again navigational quick links if your question basically falls in this certain domain you can click through that link and you can get your answers much more quickly as well you can also get your answers based on what recent activity two meant we have google gadgets or so previously if there was any bug be used to make a sticky post and it used to be you know at the start of the forum and if there was any escalation there was not an efficient way in which we used to respond and tell people that this issue has been resolved of this bug has been taken care of so we have a gadget google gadgets for basically announcing well known bugs that saying that hey we know of this bug and we have identified it and rectified it or basically an issue which has been resolved as well so this is something again from a technology standpoint something has changed from the old model as well so after all this if you still have questions the easiest way to do is just basically post your question it's highly likely that you have something really specific and we would like you to actually go ahead and post it because that might be a burning that might translate into a burning issue and you basically are helping out other webmasters you know know about this issue as well and help them resolve it as well so after you basically make sure that you've searched for it I would recommend you if you don't find your answers to definitely go ahead and post on the forum as well alright this was the graph I was saying so if you have a look at this graph this basically tells you the number of posts made on the y-axis against you know the timeline which is basically a set of data for the last 24 months the lower red dot you know is basically the point where we launched our new platform which is the master help forum and you see the you know the user activity actually hitting the roof there and it's you know so again something that we really are proud of and that's exactly what we wanted to improve user base you know get more users and also build a community around recognize our top users as well alright so time for some real example some success stories people who had questions they didn't know what to do the they rang the doorbell of webmaster help forum and in fact they found their answers quite quickly so this was a webmaster who accidentally actually left a sensitive client data it was basically credit card information of his client and he let Googlebot crawl it so he obviously was mad because he didn't know what was happening he didn't know whose fault this rage so he basically was came to forum asking you know I need a way to get this off the forum immediately there are a couple of ways of removing your content from google driver you can they're actually two issues you know removing content from google which already has been indexed or in fact letting Googlebot know crawl in the first place at all but this was a case where he already got his content you know index and he wanted to remove and the way we and what happened eventually is that he got to know that is something called as webmaster tools that he could sign up for and there's a tool within which he can you know immediately expedite the process of removing that sensitive information and you know he did it and he basically got that sensitive information down or within within a few hours so this is again you know not maybe a savvy webmaster but we have thousands of them out there and this is a platform which is giving a lot of value to all those people out there yeah so let's move on to the next one this is again another interesting one this is a site of a church what happened is that people were searching for it and you know we had snippets were turning out he didn't know what to do really controversial snippets coming out and so what he did is he came to the forum and he asked know what's going on so obviously as you guys might have already guessed this site has been hacked and he wanted to know what are the best practices of you know preventing this in the future how to remove this content obviously immediately and to how to basically build a more efficient and a foolproof site as well and he got his answers and and when he was again a happy customer so there are various you know success stories like this as I said the user base is not only unlike the sitemaps group time when they were experienced webmasters talking about sitemap protocol syntax and the general generation of sitemap this the broad the scope has actually brought in to a point that you know people with almost no experience it might be a webmaster who's asking questions or you might even might be the client you know the owner of the website was asking questions as well so he might not have any idea of the basics of their mastering so we are trying to help out and cater to all all this you know audience out there alright moving on again I wanted to give a special shout-out to our top contributors we call them the Bionic posters again all of these are experienced webmasters and extremely pro google but nothing to take away from the fact that is there they know what they talk these are people who are only their free time have helped out thousands and thousands of webmasters around the world we have people from you know these are some of some of them we have you know even more on our target is basically increase more and more top contributors or what we call them as the bionic process in future because essentially it is not possible that they know every question is answered and so what we want to do is basically build a community where people are answering questions to other people on the forum rock then every time Google answering a single question and that is basically our whole idea of recognizing these top contributors and you know improving the dynamics of the community that people as well so special shout-out to all of them out there alright so I thought I'd actually take a few minutes to talk about some of the frequently asked questions but again you know a couple of them have already been answered comprehensively by Adam earlier I think the only one that I'll take right now is the second question so they were this is a frequent question about people buying domains Reese resell domains or parked domains and they don't really have an idea about what that site looked like in the past and the question was whether you know it will affect my site at all and basically the crux of the question is what is the best practices while you are you know buying already own domains so the answer is simple you know basically verified through webmaster tools look at the backlinks of your site if there are any if you feel there are some unnecessary or irrelevant links you would want to clean them off immediately and most importantly than everything if you still feel that there is some this is somewhere affecting your position in Google search it's always you know I'm going to actually file a reconsideration request which is basically an option for you who thinks that I've done everything fine but I still think that you know I don't deserve the position that I have and you know you could file a reconsideration request specially in cases of buying already own domains because it's not possible for you to know the activity of the domain in the past there is very little resources out there so it's always good to basically file a reconsideration request we have a look at the side we have a way in identifying in the user activity on that side before and we would take action accordingly but otherwise the other questions were basically already answered geo-targeting was answer pretty well duplicate content was answered comprehensively as well in fact the highlight I would say of today's session is basically the cleaner because it kind of covered most of the frequently asked questions that we usually a spot in the webmaster help forum as well with that I think I have come to the last slide thanks again for all of you inviting or I mean accepting our invitations again a shout out to our the mastering community on orkut this is specific to Indian webmasters I'd recommend you to go ahead and sign up so that the turnaround time you know might be a little faster as well because we are on lookout for questions more and more questions on on this community as well