Sebastian's Pamphlets: Help Google revealing the secret sauce!

Do you remember this Do's & Don'ts page?

Google Information for Webmasters
Webmaster Dos and Don'ts
Do:

Create a site with content and design that are straightforward, appropriate and relevant for visitors to your site.
Feel free to exchange links with other sites that are compatible with your site's content and users' interests.
Be very careful about allowing an individual consultant or company to 'optimize' your web site. Chances are they will engage in some of our "Don'ts" and end up hurting your site.
Consider submitting your sites to our partner directories Yahoo! and DMOZ.

Don't:

Cloak.
Write text or create links that can be seen by search engines but not by visitors to your site.
Participate in link exchanges for the sole purpose of increasing your ranking in search engines.
Send automated queries to Google in an attempt to monitor your site's ranking.
Use programs that generate lots of generic doorway pages.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/dos.html five years ago (restored)

That's Google's Webmaster guidelines as per 2002, when the Webmaster's section covered all topics on a dozen or so pages. In the meantime it was translated into many languages, and grew considerably. Todays Webmaster Help Center is an authoritative resource for experienced search geeks able to gather the tidbits various Googlers spread on the Web too.

That's going to change. Ríona MacNamara from Google's Webmaster Central team in Kirkland asks for ideas on How to revamp Google's Webmaster Help Center:

We're planning to restructure the Webmaster Tools Help Center to improve the way we organize and present help content. We want to make sure that our content is technically accurate, relevant, and up to date, and that it's easy to navigate and find exactly what you're looking for. Is the content broad enough in scope? Deep enough in detail? Does it have the right mix of instructional and conceptual info? [...] Is the Help Center -- well, helpful?

I hope that Google is willing to evolve the Webmasters Help Center to become a useful resource for spare time Webmasters, site owners, publishers, bloggers and other non-geeks, along with in-depth information addressing search geeks. Assuming in its current shape it's meant to help out non-search-geeks, I must state that it hosts some of the worst FAQ items ever. The contents are certainly helpful if the reader has a great deal of Google specific knowledge, experience in reading Google-ish text, and knows what to read with a grain of salt because Google cannot tell the way the cookie crumbles to protect their secret sauce. Well, instead of reading rants, or bitching yourself, why not add your 0.02?

Click here to tell Google what you want and expect.

Please don't get fooled by "Tools" in the thread title. The tools are nicely explained, what we want is the secret sauce dumped into the general help system ;)

Labels: Google, SEO, Webmaster Central