I am seriously surprised how the trend has changed from completely ignoring what people shout about their sites to a full customer care by all the search engines. I belong to one of the old member group of webmasterworld and before about 3 years search engines rarely care about a webmaster or site owner's cries. People used to shout, cry and express their pain in forums like webmasterworld and ihelpyou but no search engine employee gave their ears on looking into their problems.

But now its a total different world I would say. Looking at the prompt responses people get from search quality engineers about their site problems it makes me seriously amazed.

For Google we have mattcutts blog, webmaster central blog, adwords rep in webmasterworld forum , John Muller participating in forums, Mattcutts goes around in webmaster / SEO blogs and responds to any specific problems or concerns ( ofcourse his blog is great ) , we have Google Groups where many employees like John Muller, Jonathan simon, Adam Lasnik, Susan, Mariya etc hangout, Most of the google experts are always around when a webmaster is serious about their problems,

Back in 2003 we just had one ghost like representative from Google named GoogleGuy in webmasterworld who comes around and asks for feedback. If there is some update to their algorithm or search index occasionally he will respond with a lot of ambiguity. His answers are like answers from the Google god itself and his posts are followed so much. People just come to webmaster world to search for his posts. Till today 95% or more webmasterworld active members don't know who the real person with the nickname Googleguy is. Many suspect Googleguy is Mattcutts but he denied to be the original Googleguy. But today things have changed we now have Google employees answering questions all over the place. They recently hosted a webmaster live chat session first of its kind which was a success attended by more than 250 people.

For yahoo it used to be Tim Mayer nick named Yahoo Tim he just comes around and gives a weather update ( Yahoo’s index update ) or answers some rare questions but now they have a wonderful place for webmasters to seek help.

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=SiteExplorer

This place gives much better support than what Google does. I rarely see a question that is not reviewed by a yahoo site explorer employee. That is a very positive sign and a huge step forward in bringing webmasters/White hat SEOs and site owners closer. Its great that Yahoo a search engine which used to be very reluctant to help webmasters now have a place where they provide instant solution for Site owner’s problems.


MSN it used to be MSN dude he started from the day MSN separated from Yahoo to become an independent Search Engine. He comes for some feedback but never used to be regular but now even the big Microsoft has a forum for webmasters to talk about problem with their sites. When I visited this forum I can see people like Brett Hunt a Live search employee actively answering questions of site owners. This is great.

So seeing the world change so much I can just say one thing finally search engines have understood the importance of Good relationship and communication with webmasters and site owners to maintain the quality of the index. A Good communication and setting up strong guidelines help webmasters go in the right direction when it comes to ranking their sites in Search Engines.

I like to thank wholeheartedly all top Search engine Engineers for taking this bold step of helping us webmasters.

Search Engine Genie

Labels: search engines

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