Google has a group for webmasters where you can post questions about your web site and receive answers from the community and Google employees. It is called Google webmaster help. It was much improved recently with the addition of extra dedicated Google staff. They have been improved again with the addition of FAQ pages.
The new FAQ sections created by Adam Lasnik over the weekend are refreshingly frank about a couple of subjects. An example…
Does validating my site (with a tool such as the W3C validator) help my site’s ranking in Google’s search results pages?
- No, at least not directly. However, to the extent that cleaning up your HTML makes your site more accessible to people with disabilities or folks accessing your pages on portable or other devices, it can improve the popularity of your site… increasing natural links to your site (which can help with your Google ranking), traffic, and so on.
Most of the FAQ’s are not going to amaze you or impress you. But they serve a very important purpose for the new visitors of the Google group who very often have quite simple questions and are completely unfamiliar with Google and SEO. For the people who have to answer the same questions over and over, this is a welcome new feature.
See the FAQ section for “Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking” here.
Also of Google note, the Google Webmaster Central blog speaks of how to create valuable start pages.
