Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller hosted a Webmaster Central Office Hours hangout on Tuesday, and talked about he prospect of Google adding a feature to Webmaster Tools, which would let them know about automated actions that were taken against their sties, and how webmasters could go about fixing any issues.
This was buried nearly forty minutes (38 minutes and 36 seconds to be precise) into the video, which itself is over an hour long.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable pulled this tidbit including a transcript out of the video. Here are some excerpts:
I think it might make sense at some point to find something that does something similar to what these algorithms are doing and bubble that up to the webmaster and say, hey, our Webmaster Tools quality check has recognized that these and these and these types of pages are generally lower quality. Maybe that’s something you want to look at. But I don’t think it would make sense to take the search ranking algorithms and kind of bubble that information up directly in Webmaster Tools just because it has a very different goal. But I do bring this up with the Webmaster Tools and the engineering team every now and then to make sure that we don’t lose track of that because I think sometimes, some of the information from these algorithms could be really useful to webmasters.
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These are definitely things that we’re always looking into and thinking about how much we could put more of this into Webmaster Tools, how much we have the technical details covered in Webmaster Tools, and say, well, technically, Webmaster Tools covers everything you need. Now we need to focus on kind of the softer factors. They’re always long discussions. I mean, if there’s something we can bubble up in Webmaster Tools there, I think I’d definitely be for that. But we really need to make sure that we’re bubbling up something that’s really actionable for you guys, not something where you see, oh, well, our algorithms think your site is kind of mediocre. And that doesn’t really help you.
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But all of this is probably fairly far off. It’s definitely not something where you’ll see this showing up in Webmaster Tools the next week or so. But we do try to bring these things into the discussions with the Webmaster Tools team and with the engineering teams to try to see how much of the information that we create about a website can be shown to the webmaster to help guide them in the right way.
Mueller also commented on Schwart’z post about all of this adding, “Just to clarify, this is not ‘on the horizon.’ While we talk about ideas like these internally & externally, that doesn’t mean that they’re coming anytime soon, or even at all. I love seeing big steps being taken with our products, and you have to start with an idea, but ultimately not all ideas can be realized :).”
In other words, keep dreaming.
Image via YouTube
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