Google and Yahoo! add webmaster support portals, with help files, blogs, discussion forums and tools.

The Google Blog expresses its love for webmasters in a recent post, announcing the new Google Webmaster Central.

The Webmaster Central is another attempt at improving the communication between the search engine and webmasters looking for ways of improving its standing in search engine results.

The blog says that:

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.

Some may question the motivation behind such a move. Does Google try to move the Google related discussion over to its own turf, gaining a better control of it that way?

It is interesting to note that only one day later the Yahoo! Search Blog commented upon its latest search index update, announcing that:

We are trying to connect with you more directly and enrich our interaction even further through Site Explorer. Please authenticate your site in Site Explorer and join the conversation on the Site Explorer forum.

So there you go, not only Google, but Yahoo! as well invites webmasters to discuss the occult art of search engine optimization at their own domains.

And Yahoo! has its own webmaster central as well, this one called “Yahoo! Search Resources for Webmasters”.

Obviously, if Google and Yahoo! employees stop taking part in other search engine forum discussions, like on Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch forums, there would be reason to worry.

Still, we believe these are exactly what the search engines say they are: forums and sites that might bring in additional information of relevance to webmasters.

Here is a short summary of what the two webmaster centrals have to offer:

The Google Webmaster Central contains:

1. A site status wizard which you can use to check if your site is being spidered by Google.

2. Webmaster tools (in essence the old Sitemaps service for giving Google data about your web site).

3. Info on how to submit your site to Google (including information on Google Base, the Books Partner Program, and Video Uploads).

4. A new Google Blog for Webmasters, with information on index updates, crawlers, and other technical issues.

5. Then there is the above mentioned Google discussion group for webmasters.

6. And, finally, a webmaster help center, which gather many of the most relevant help pages.

The Yahoo! Webmaster Help section contains:

1. A link to the Yahoo! Search Blog (We guess they have reckoned there is no need for a separate blog for webmasters).

2. Search Help (Like Google, Yahoo! has gathered all relevant help pages in one spot).

3. Search Content Guidelines — in essence a discussion of what Yahoo! considers “good stuff” and what it considers spam.

4. A form for reporting spam. This is how you can bring down your competitor. Report any spammy techniques they may use and see their rankings drop into oblivion. But remember: They can do the same to you!

5. Support Feedback form. This is the form you use when your competitor has arrested you for spam and you have to beg Yahoo! for forgiveness. You may also use it to complain about Yahoo’s spiders, get help in removing pages from their index, copyright issues and more.

6. There is also a separate suggestion form where you can make suggestions for improvement and more.

7. The Yahoo! Site Explorer lets you analyse the standing of your own site (or that of your rivals). This is a popular tool among search engine marketers as it gives a much more accurate picture of your number of back-links than Google. Google’s search engine is totally unreliable in this respect. If you sign in and add a small text file to your site’s server, you may also use this service to find out if Yahoo! is able to find your site. You may also give it the URL of your RSS feed, helping Yahoo’s spiders to index your new pages.

8. And finally, there is a submit page, which gives you information on how to submit your site for free, the pay per click text ad programme and Yahoo’s Search Submit Express (where you can pay Yahoo! to do something they should do for free anyway, namely index your pages).

It should be noted that these are not all new features. However, these search engines are now trying to give the various help pages and webmaster tools a more coherent interface, making it easier for readers to find the relevant information.

MSN and Ask

Moreover, even though MSN and Ask have no similar “webmaster centrals”, they do provide much of the same information.