We love you, webmasters

Posted by Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central, and Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

We always aim to offer our users relevant and helpful results, and webmasters provide the great content that we point to. Unfortunately -- though we've had the pleasure of chatting with many of you in a variety of forums, around the blogosphere, and at many conferences across the world -- we simply haven't been able to interact with every one of you. So we're excited to announce our new Google Webmaster Central, which enables us to have productive conversations with many more of you, all the time.

Recently, we've added:

• A new Webmaster Central blog, where you'll find lots of information about how we crawl and index sites.
• An expanded Webmaster Help Google Group featuring helpful conversations with other webmasters and Googlers.
• Tons of new and updated FAQs.

Furthermore, Google Sitemaps has been renamed Google webmaster tools. It's more than a new coat of paint; we've added and improved lots of geeky goodies to help give you more info and control.

For those of you who've already established a Google sitemap, have no fear: the Sitemaps protocol remains unchanged and Sitemaps submission mechanisms and reporting is still available from the Sitemaps tab. If you haven't already added a Sitemap, you might want to learn more about it. (In short, putting a Sitemap file on your site enables you to tell us what pages your site has, which of them are most important, and how often they are typically updated.)

You've worked hard on your sites, and, not surprisingly, you want to make sure they're listed appropriately in Google, so of course you have lots of questions. You can find many answers simply by creating a Google webmaster tools account (if you have a Google Account, you're already set), adding your site URL to your account, and verifying that you own the site. A few of the many things you can do with webmaster tools:

• Tell us if you'd prefer your site's URLs to be indexed with the www or without.
• View any errors we had crawling your site.
• See an analysis of your robots.txt file and a way to test changes to it.
• See what searches bring up your site in the results and what position the site shows up.
• Request reinclusion of your site if you're previously violated the webmaster guidelines.

We've also put together a comprehensive webmaster help center to answer more of your questions, such as:

• What are Google's webmaster guidelines?
• How can I improve my site's ranking?
  
• Why doesn't my site show up for a specific keyword?
• My URL changed, so how can I get Google to index my new site?
• What's a "supplemental result"?

With our webmaster tools and webmaster help center, we're able to tackle an increasing number of questions and make the answers available to all webmasters. But we're not planning to rest on our laurels. We're listening to your concerns (in person and all over the Net!) and working hard to expand the content and languages of our help center. We appreciate the webmaster community very much, and look forward to many great conversations to come. We couldn't do search without you.