Join our first Virtual Webmaster Unconference
While the in-person Webmaster Conference events are still on hold, we continue to share insights and information with you in the Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks series on our YouTube channel. But we understand that you might be missing the connection during live events, so we’d like to invite you to join a new event format: the first Virtual Webmaster Unconference, on August 26th, at 8AM PDT!
What is the Virtual Webmaster Unconference?
Because we want you to actively participate in the event, this is neither a normal Webmaster Conference nor a typical online conference. This event isn’t just for you – it’s your event. In particular, the word “Unconference” means that you get to choose which sessions you want to attend and become an active part of. You will shape the event by taking part in discussions, feedback sessions and similar formats that need your input.
It’s your chance to collaborate with other webmasters, SEOs, developers, digital marketers, publishers and Google product teams, such as Search Console and Google Search, and help us to deliver more value to you and the community.
How does it work?
We have opened the registration for a few more spots in the event again. If you’re seeing “registration is closed”, the spots have filled up already. We may run more events in the future, so keep an eye on our Twitter feed and this blog.
As part of the registration process, we will ask you to select two sessions you would like to participate in. Only the sessions that receive the most votes will be scheduled to take place on the event day, so make sure you pick your favorite ones before August 19th!
As we have limited spots, we might have to select attendees based on background and demographics to get a good mix of perspectives in the event. We will let you know by August 20th if your registration is confirmed. Once your registration is confirmed, you will receive the invitation for the Google Meet call on August 26th with all the other participants, the MC and the session leads. You can expect to actively participate in the sessions you’re interested in via voice and/or video call through Google Meet. Please note that the sessions will not be recorded; we will publish a blog post with some of the top learnings after the event.
We have very interesting proposals lined up for you to vote on, as well as other fun surprises. Save your spot before August 19th and join the first ever Virtual Webmaster Unconference!
Posted by Martin Splitt, Search Relations Team
2018, celebrating our global Webmaster community
2018 has been a very important year for our webmaster support community. What has happened? There’s been a program rebranding, a global summit, and loads of community hangouts.
In October, the former Top Contributors became Gold Product Experts, and the Rising Stars, Silver Product Experts. This rebranding happened throughout all of the product forums and these are some of the new badges and names:
Silver Product Expert: Newer members who are developing their product knowledge
Gold Product Expert: Trusted members who are knowledgeable and active contributorsIn November, we invited all of our Gold Product Experts from every Google help forum (such as Blogger or Google My Business) to a global summit. This meetup happened in the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. Out of the almost 550 attendees from all over the world, around 70 were Webmaster Gold Product Experts. Coming from 25 different countries, this was the second biggest community that attended the event. Later that month, another very successful meetup took place in Moscow, gathering 23 Russian speaking Product Experts (of which 10 were Webmasters).
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| Gold Webmaster Product Experts at this year’s global summit in Sunnyvale. |
Many of the attendees acknowledged that this “was a really valuable time”, that the “sessions were very insightful and interesting” and that “the entire event was fantastic!”.
This knowledgeable group of super users provides invaluable help in 16 languages to more than 2 million users a year, about everything related to Search, Structured Data or Search Console in the forums.
And what is the profile of our community? Many of our Product Experts (Silver and Gold) are site owners who started out on the Webmaster forums (some more than a decade ago) by asking questions about their own sites. After their issues were fixed, most of them stayed to give back to the community, as they realized that their expertise could be of use to others. We want to thank all of our experts for their dedication and constant knowledge sharing to help users who are having trouble with their websites.
Throughout the year, we’ve held 75 live office hours hangouts on the Webmaster YouTube channel, in English, Japanese, German, Hindi, French, and we’ve also kick started the calls in Spanish. On those hangouts, anyone can raise their questions to the Google team directly and interact with one another.
If you’re interested in joining the community, meeting everyone and helping other users on the Webmaster forums, you can learn more on the Product Experts program website. We are always excited to meet users from diverse backgrounds and skill-sets!
Looking forward to what 2019 will bring to our community… And looking forward to meeting you!
Written by Aurora Morales, Trust & Safety Outreach team
Our goal: helping webmasters and content creators
Great websites are the result of the hard work of website owners who make their content and services accessible to the world. Even though it’s simpler now to run a website than it was years ago, it can still feel like a complex undertaking. This is why we invest a lot of time and effort in improving Google Search so that website owners can spend more time focusing on building the most useful content for their users, while we take care of helping users find that content.
Most website owners find they don’t have to worry much about what Google is doing—they post their content, and then Googlebot discovers, crawls, indexes and understands that content, to point users to relevant pages on those sites. However, sometimes the technical details still matter, and sometimes a great deal.
For those times when site owners would like a bit of help from someone at Google, or an explanation for why something works a particular way, or why things appear in a particular way, or how to fix what looks like a technical glitch, we have a global team dedicated to making sure there are many places for a website owner to get help from Google and knowledgeable members of the community.
The first place to start for help is Google Webmasters, a place where all of our support resources (many of which are available in 40 languages) are within easy reach:
- Google Web Fundamentals: Provides technical guidance on building a modern website that takes advantage of open web standards.
- Google Search developer documentation: Describes how Google crawls and indexes a website. Includes authoritative guidance on building a site that is optimized for Google Search.
- Search Console Help Center: Provides detailed information on how to use and take advantage of Search Console, the best way for a website owner to understand how Google sees their site.
- The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide: Provides a complete overview of the basics of SEO according to our recommended best practices.
- Google webmaster guidelines: Describes policies and practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam action that can negatively affect their Search appearance.
- Google Webmasters YouTube Channel
Our second path to getting help is through our Google Webmaster Central Help Forums. We have forums in 16 languages—in English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. The forums are staffed with dedicated Googlers who are there to make sure your questions get answered. Aside from the Googlers who monitor the forums, there is an amazing group of Product Experts who generously offer their time to help other members of the community—many times providing greater detail and analysis for a particular website’s content than we could. The forums allow for both a public discussion and, if the case requires it, for private follow-up replies in the forum.
A third path for support to website owners is our series of Online Webmaster Office Hours — in English, German, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi and French. Anyone who joins these is welcome to ask us questions about website appearance in Google Search, which we will answer to the best of our abilities. All of our team members think that one of the best parts of speaking at conferences and events is the opportunity to answer questions from the audience, and the online office hours format creates that opportunity for many more people who might not be able to travel to a specialized event. You can always check out the Google Webmaster calendar for upcoming webmaster officer hours and live events.
While how a website behaves on the web is openly visible to all who can see it, we know that some website owners prefer not to make it known their website has a problem in a public forum. There’s no shame in asking for support, but if you have an issue for your website that seems sensitive—for which you don’t think you can share all the details publicly—you can call out that you would prefer to share necessary details only with someone experienced and who is willing to help, using the forum’s “Private Reply” feature.
Are there other things you think we should be doing that would help your website get the most out of search? Please let us know — in our forums, our office hours, or via Twitter @googlewmc.
Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón from Google’s Webmaster Outreach & Support team
