JLH Design Blog

Matt Cutts now has a new sentence at the bottom of his blog posts,

Got a webmaster-related question or suggestion that is not directly related to the topic of this entry? Instead of posting it here, your best bet is our official Google forum linked from http://www.google.com/webmasters/

I initially had mixed feelings on this and even concerns but I am now coming around to this being a good sign of things to come.

My number one concern was the fact that the group is basically self-running with little to no official interaction. Oh sure, once a week* or less someone comes on in and answers a question, but as a percentage of user participation that number is really down lately, despite Adam’s threat* that more people at Google were interested in helping out. Google’s webmaster’s central already funnels too many people looking for answers with too few people actually answering that I don’t know how much more load the system can handle. We know that they’ve hired at least one great new employee to work in webmaster relations, but he was also the #1 question answerer* so that void will need to be filled some how.

On a positive note this does signal at least that Matt is acknowledging that the Webmaster Help Group is THE OFFICIAL help group. Despite his belief that everyone that is a webmaster lives in California , hopefully funneling people towards it will help increase it’s visibility. I do find it odd that he would link to webmaster central* with instruction on finding the link and not the group* itself.

I am only grasping at straws and possibly living on false hope, but with Matt Cutts officially endorsing THE OFFICIAL webmaster help group I am taking this is a sign that they are going to work on consolidating all of the information put out there in a more central location. This subject was discussed at length in a thread* started by Susan Moskwa (of blue badge fame), sorry www.searchenginewebsitelandforumMOZroundtable.com. With all of the discussion by Googlers about things “being a scalable solution” you’d think they’d want to approach webmaster support in the same manner. Having ‘X’ amount of Googlers posting answers in ‘Y’ arenas really waters down the message that should be being served up in THE OFFICIAL help group, regardless of your geographic location and whether or not you can get free tickets to stand in a room with a search engineer.

* over 2900 (10 of which were even helpful to someone) posts of free content on which to serve your ads by me* and nary a link or acknowledgement and nofollowing all your own links get’s you nofollowed in my book.