First of all, following your guidelines (and explaining them to
Webmasters and Web developers) since the very first version I've to
admit that you've improved them steadily to become a useful resource
for specialists who are able to gather the missing tidbits you
Googlers spread on the Web too. I'm glad that you're willing to evolve
them to become a useful resource for spare time Webmasters, site
owners, publishers, bloggers and other non-search-geeks. I appreciate
your call for input very much, and I hope that you involve us during
the various redesign stages.

Providing Webmaster support since 2001 or so I could write a book in
response to your post. Fortunately some very bright folks have raised
the most important issues already. Hence I pick a single item to
explain my take on the causes why your current help system is not
helpful for non-geeks:

<blockquote>
My URL changed, so how can I get Google to index my new site?
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34464&q...

While we can't manually change your URL in our search results, there
are steps you can take to make sure your transition is smooth.

First, you can redirect individuals to your new site. If your old URLs
redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects, our
crawler will discover the new URLs. For more information about 301
HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

Google listings are based in part on our ability to find you from
links on other sites. To preserve your rank, you'll want to tell
others who link to you of your change of address. One way to find a
sampling of sites that link to yours is to perform a link search. To
learn how, please visit http://www.google.com/help/features.html#link.
To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to your page,
perform a Google search on your URL. On the results page, select the
"Find web pages that contain the term" link, and Google will provide
you with webpages that mention your address.
</blockquote>

This topic covers information one needs for many purposes:
- Consolidating domains
- Changing/moving domains
- Fixing canonicalization issues
- Replacing Web pages
- Changing underlying technologies
- Consolidating Web pages
- Handling removed URLs
- Avoiding duplicated contents
- Handling landing page URLs with affiliate IDs
- UA cloaking to enhance crawlability when the supp index got flooded
with URLs containing sessionIDs or other tracking parameters,
redundant arguments and other obsolete noise
- ...

Its prominent points of entry are "301 redirect" and "URL changed",
thus a Webmaster searching for advice on one of the topics above will
never reach it. That's not only a question of linking this topic from
related articles. To trigger the *right* searches you must add a
"usages" section containing related keywords in the anchor text of
links pointing to items explaining the usage of permanent redirects
for each and every use case you can think of. Also predefined tags as
well as user tagging of topics would be pretty helpful.

That said, you need to add articles/FAQ items/tutorials/... for each
(sensible) possible question closely or at least somewhat related to
301 redirects.

Findability is not everything, the information provided must be useful
and comprehensive too. The text quoted above is neither useful nor
helpful. In fact it's completely useless, misleading, and confusing:

"First, you can redirect individuals to your new site. If your old
URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects,
our crawler will discover the new URLs."

You know the process, so why not describe it? Tell that you remove the
redirecting page in the search index before you index the destination
if it's not yet known, tell that the link love from inbound links
pointing to the outdated URL will be transferred to the new URL, and
give an idea of the throughput depending on PageRank and other
factors, tell that the PageRank transfer cannot be tracked by looking
at toolbar PR, tell why moving large sites in chunks makes sense and
why ...

"For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt"

Do you really think that the average publisher can be bothered with
reading a RFC *and* that this non-geek can get something useful out of
it? Not really. You don't write for engineers, you're addressing for
example small business owners and their auxiliary persons who may be
programmers or secretaries. Here's a sample of a FAQ entry covering
redirects, which is also way too technical but explains things better:
http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=163&page=110#301

"Google listings are based in part on our ability to find you from
links on other sites. To preserve your rank, you'll want to tell
others who link to you of your change of address. One way to find a
sampling of sites that link to yours is to perform a link search. To
learn how, please visit http://www.google.com/help/features.html#link.
"

That's plain misleading and confusing. How can you point users to a
functionality which does not delivers what it's expected to deliver
*by design*? Don't expect any understanding of the "sampling" bit. You
know that link: searches are designed to show nothing or a randomly
selected set of useless and outdated samples because you were short on
disc space and later on you didn't want to reveal too much information
to SEOs. Remember that exactly this search operator is responsible for
all the link spam you're fighting now because a few years ago you've
decided to show only PR4+ links in reverse citation results. Don't
promote it, bury it or revamp it, and especially do not point to it
when you know that it's completely useless for its purpose.

Better state something in the lines of "When you redirect a page which
is linked from other pages not under your control you should contact
the Webmasters asking them to change the URL. Don't forget to change
the URL in your internal links too". Then just point to the Webmaster
tools but don't forget to tell that links from pages in the
supplemental index don't make it on the list of inbound links, and
why, and in which frequence these lists get updated, and why they're
sorted by commonness and not importance...

"To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to your page,
perform a Google search on your URL. On the results page, select the
"Find web pages that contain the term" link, and Google will provide
you with webpages that mention your address."

You know that this doesn't work as expected. The result is incomplete,
because it covers only links with the URL in page/anchor/noframe text,
not the source code.

"You may also be interested in...
    * How do I add my site to Google's search results?
    * Why doesn't Google index all of the pages of my site?
    * Why doesn't my site show up for a specific keyword?"

These hints are useless, unrelated, and out of context.

That's a pretty good example of "the worst FAQ entry ever".

Realize that you've created a pretty complex service and that the
average user will not understand how large scalable systems work. Bear
in mind that most folks believe that Ms. Googlebot does the indexing
and that she is responsible for penalties, filtering and ordering
results and whatever. It's not necessary to tell that crawling,
indexing and handling search queries are independent processes, or to
explain your architecture in detail. It's important that you provide
good and understandable answers to common questions in a way that the
non-geek can follow you, getting detailed step by step advice on the
tasks s/he has to do, written in a form that fits the questioners
intellect and knowledge. With every sentence you write keep ind mind
that abstraction is an academic skill and the questioner may lack
it.

HTH
Sebastian

On May 31, 6:17 am, Riona MacNamara wrote: