The Google Webmaster Central Blog: A Retrospective – Keylime Toolbox

In August of 2005, Google Sitemaps was a fledging new product (it launched in June with little more than an XML definition, a Python script, and a submission UI) and we were looking for a way to let our users know when we added features. Google has lots of blogs now, but it had very few back then. The main Google blog was going strong, of course, and AdSense and AdWords had popular blogs as well, but most other products didn’t. (Now there are more than 70!)

Matt Cutts had been out talking to webmasters for years and had recently started a blog of his own. I worked with Karen Wickre, who leads the Google corporate blogging efforts, and our product marketing manager on the best way to launch this crazy new blog idea. As those of you who blog know so well, launching a new blog is a huge undertaking. You need a plan for updating it with fresh and interesting content and when blogging isn’t your full-time (or even part-time) job, that plan becomes not only more difficult, but more vital.

At first, the blog mostly fulfilled its original purpose. We posted when we added features to let our users know to go check them out.

The first few posts were about Sitemap index files, Sitemap file naming, and the launch of mobile Sitemaps.

And Then, A Shift
However, a curious thing happened. Looking back now, it doesn’t seem quite so curious, but at the time, it was a substantial shift that was amazingly positive for our team (and in my view, for the industry). Our team started thinking of ourselves — our product, our blog, our related Sitemaps Google Group — as serving all the search engine-related needs of the webmaster community, not just their Sitemaps protocol-related needs. (The first non-Sitemaps specific post seems to be from October 2005 about using advanced operators to learn more about what Google knows about your site.)

We started working even more closely with Matt, who after all, has more experience than anyone at Google in knowing what webmasters want and need. The blog began changing focus as part of an entire team shift, which was reflected in the product as well. In April of 2006, we took our Sitemaps documentation and merged that with the existing webmaster guidelines and other documentation, worked with the support team who tirelessly answered webmaster email questions, and created an entirely new webmaster help center. By August 2006, this shift from Sitemaps support to webmaster support was complete. It was clear through our now fairly robust support suite (tools, blog, discussion forum, and help center) that what we offered went well beyond “Sitemaps” and a name change was in order.

The Launch Of Webmaster Central
We launched Webmaster Central, which incorporated all of these components into one comprehensive offering. As part of that, we changed the name of the Google Sitemaps product to Google Webmaster Tools, the name of the Inside Google Sitemaps blog to the Google Webmaster Central blog, and we created a multi-category Google Group, with major sections to reflect the types of issues webmasters were discussing in our previous, less-accurately named “Google Sitemaps” group.

This was an exciting change. It paved the way for a number of positive initiatives: we could more easily expand the scope of the product since it was positioned as a comprehensive webmaster resource, so both internally and externally, things like Sitelink information and geographic location control made more sense; creating the new “webmaster trends analyst” position was a logical extension of the team, as the value of understanding the issues of the webmaster community easily complimented a comprehensive webmaster support system; and specific to the blog, it made even more sense to get various search-related teams to write blog posts and share what they were doing with the webmaster community.

Out of Beta! Comments!
In February 2007, we took Webmaster Tools out of beta and we enabled comments on the blog. Not long after we launched in the initial blog in 2005, other teams began adding blogs about their products, but as with launching a blog, enabling comments is not a small undertaking. You have to understand the time involved to read the comments, research information when need be, and reply when appropriate. When we enabled comments, Jonathan Simon, our first webmaster trends analyst, did a great job in managing that. We were the first existing blog to enable comments (although the Librarian Central blog launched with comments enabled from the start, so they were technically the first to have comments.)

The Intricacies of Corporate Blogging
While I was at Google, I managed the blog: I wrote posts, worked with those on my team and on other teams to write posts, kept track of stats, and stayed in close contact with Karen Wickre about what Google was doing generally with blogging. Corporate blogging is different than personal blogging. You have to remember that you’re not only representing yourself — you’re representing your team, your product, and the entire company.

When you’re blogging for yourself, you may have a sense of your audience, but with corporate blogging, this is even more critical. You want to deliver the information your audience is looking for in a timely, accurate way. We got ideas for blog posts a number of ways: from issues people raised in the forums and elsewhere on the web, from questions people asked or presentations we gave at conferences, and from internal Googlers who had things they wanted to talk about.

It’s Only Gotten Better Since I Left! (Heh, what does that say about me…?)
Maile Ohye has taken over a lot of the blog management responsibility, and the blog is ROCKING. The variety of topics and writers have continued to increase and the quality of the information they publish is fantastic. So, as you might imagine, I was ecstatic to see that the blog had won the Search Engine Journal Best Search Engine Corporate Blog of 2007. I know how hard everyone worked to get the blog to the place it is now, and how passionate Googlers are about providing useful and timely information via the blog. I cannot tell you how happy I am that webmasters find it to be a valuable resource. I never imagined, back when we first had discussions about launching a blog in mid 2005, that it would grow to what you see today, and its success is definitely the result of people you see (like Matt and Maile) and people you may not (like Karen Wickre).

Little known fact! Find it difficult to remember the long URL of googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com? Just type in kirklandwc.com. It redirects to the blog. What’s kirklandwc, you might ask? Well WC stands for “webmaster central” and the team is based in Kirkland!

Want another tip? All the old posts from the Sitemaps blog as still available, but they’re difficult to get to since the home page URL redirects to the new blog. Check out some of the highlights of the old blog or search through the archives.

And Google isn’t the only one dispensing webmaster-centric advice. Yahoo! often posts webmaster-specific information on the Yahoo! Search Blog, and Microsoft recently started a webmaster-specific blog as part of their Live Search Webmaster Center. Along with the engines’ discussion forums and their active presence at conferences and online discussions around the web, those involved with search marketing have access to more official information than ever.

It’s like that Coke commercial on the hill with the flowers and the singing. Maybe we should make the engine reps re-enact that commercial at SMX West….