Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Setting up and running a website is getting easier and easier, and it's wonderful to see so many new site owners sharing their voices with the world! For you as a webmaster it's pretty easy going... until you run into an issue that you just can't seem to solve on your own. Maybe some technical issues were flagged in yourWebmaster Tools account; maybe you're just trying to get your robots.txt toblock a certain part of your site; or maybe someone reported that theygot a virus while visiting your site (gasp!). All of these issues can come up and sometimes it's helpful to have a helping hand when diagnosing and solving it.

OurGoogle Webmaster Help Group is a great place to get help. There are many site owners active in our group, friendly and ready to help others, often with first-hand experience. They can show you what might be wrong, show you how you can find answers in the future, and point you towards a solution that you'll be able to use.

Just recently a site owner came into the groups with a website that was having strange problems. Less than 20 minutes later, one of our dedicated members replied and pointed them tohidden content that was placed on their site by someone else. Finding that is bad enough; but not finding it is even more frustrating.

While there are lots of helpful people in our groups, we have some that really stand out as being exceptionally active, helpful, competent and friendly. They volunteer time and energy to help build a great community and to help webmasters all around the world. In order to more publicly recognize their contributions, we're calling them ourBionic Posters. We want to highlight their outstanding efforts and thank them for the sound advice they've offered to so many.

We wanted to take a minute and send a shout out to our Bionic Posters:

• webado (Christina fromwww.webado.net)
• Phil Payne (www.isham-research.co.uk)
• cass-hacks (Craig fromcass-hacks.com)
• abracadabra (Tim fromwww.aitechsolutions.net)
• Aaron Pratt (www.ne-design.net)
• Cristina (www.asymptoticdesign.com)
• Robbo (Vince fromwww.tesol-direct.com)
• JLH (John Honeck fromwww.jlh-design.com)
• dockarl (Matt James fromwww.utheguru.com)
• IceGiant (Sasch fromwww.icegiant.co.uk)
• MrGamma (James fromwww.sitebyjames.com)
• The anonymous and helpfulseo101

Thank you all for helping to make the Webmaster Help Group such a success!

Come and visit theWebmaster Help Groups and see how you can make a difference as well. Be bionic!

Posted byJohn Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zurich