14 years after the launch of Google Webmaster Central, Google announced rebranding it as Google Search Central. All Google Webmaster Central assets, including the official blog and news source on crawling and indexing issues, the support forums and guidelines for developers, will be redirected and consolidated under the new name.
Why renaming such a familiar brand? According to Google, because the term Webmaster has aged and hasn’t been in use recently.
“Very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They’re more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few “webmasters”.”
(from Google’s announcement)
Google Trends data also support this claim. The search for the term Webmaster is in steep decline since 2015.
Looking back at Google Webmaster Central:
- Google Webmaster Central blog was launched in August 2006 (the first post was titled: We love you, webmasters). Before that, Google’s official news source for the webmasters/search community was Inside Google Sitemap, which focused mainly on the technical aspects of SEO.
- In 2006 Google’s search results still had 10 blue links:
(And Wikipedia already dominated the first position).
- The first blog posts discussed the latest Google Webmaster Tools (now Google Search Console) news and innovations, such as the ability to inform Google about the website’s preferred version (with or without www, https didn’t exist), and its latest crawl error interface.
- Google has already renamed Google Webmaster Tools to Google Search Console back in 2015. Bing and Yandex are still using the same old-fashioned name.
Google’s News Sources for SEO professionals:
- Google’s Webmaster Central Blog will be migrated to Google Search Central: https://developers.google.com/search/blog.
In addition to news updates, the blog highlights popular posts in various categories including structured data, algorithm updates, Search Console news, mobile-first index and more, as well as developers’ guidelines updates.
- The support community will be migrated to Google Search Central Help Community. It covers several categories including crawling, indexing and ranking, security, malware and hacked sites, mobile web, international SEO and more.
- The social channels has also changed their names:https://www.youtube.com/googlewebmasters https://twitter.com/googlewmc
To summarize, although I didn’t believe every word written in Google’s blogs or official guidelines, Google Webmaster Central has usually helped me in better understanding Google and instruct my clients accordingly.
