Special interview with John Honeck (JLH)

First off, thank you for taking an effort in interviewing me; I don't have a lot of name recognition in the industry at all, so I really appreciate your interest.

"Why did you write the bye posting?" is a question I've been asking myself over and over again the last few days. Hindsight being 20/20 I should have just faded away rather than making an announcement. My plan to not make any more controversy than I already have obviously blew up in my face. I've tried to ignore the group completely since leaving that message, but due to multiple emails, posts on blogs, and even a few phone calls I've revisited it a couple times. There seems to be a lot of speculation going on, and I guess I'll use the opportunity you are presenting me to clear the air a bit.

I'd like to get one thing clear right away; I didn't decide to leave the group due to any conflict with any group member or any Googler for that matter. There was no one thing that set me off, but rather a culmination of many factors. I'm not angry with anybody in particular, and as far as I know no one is angry with me. There wasn't an agreement of any kind that set my course of action in motion.

The brevity of my statement was in fact a statement itself. I have said everything I thought needed to be said already, many times, and obviously haven’t heard the responses I was interested in. I believe that Google and I have differing philosophies on how the Webmaster community is best served. Before any mental giants step in with the lame, "then ask for a refund from Google if you don’t like their customer service" argument, let me stop you, because that is not what I am talking about at all. To understand, I'll need to go into probably more detail than you'd like so feel free to exercise your editorial powers if need be.

When Google was started way back in the BackRub days the geniuses that developed it thought of a much better way to evaluate and rank the existing sites and pages available on the web. Google was an observer using its sophisticated algorithm to analyze links, text, anchor text etc. to rank the pages better than everyone else. Fast-forward to today where Google is no longer an observer they are an influencer. They shape the way that web sites look and work. Perhaps this wasn’t their intent but it is a fact. We now also have a Web that is orders of magnitude larger than when Google first started, then again so is Google with it’s thousands of employees and billions of dollars of revenue. As the internet has matured it has grown to resemble a typical democratic capitalist society with a standard pyramid type infrastructure in regards to the players, and subsequently the money. There is a small subset sitting at the top controlling the majority of the traffic, influence, and transactions. They of course also get the majority of the attention, leeway, and information from Google. I’m not one of these people so I don’t know how the system works, but I do know that when a very large site has a problem with Google it’s fixed within hours. I also know that when a very popular search engine blogger has a question he just pings a Googler and get his answer in hours. Unfortunately information doesn’t disseminate down this pyramid. All of the key players at the top can be well informed, have access, and even freely talk about what they know but the people at the bottom will never hear them. The majority of webmasters are not full time designers, SEOs, or even computer literate. They are the real people passing information and products through the web as a medium, not as the web as a business.

I’ve long been trying to push for more Googler response in the Google Webmaster Help group. I recently received some information that they were quite happy with their amount of their communication efforts with regards to webmasters. As proof this information referenced the "dozens" of Googlers, which attend worldwide conferences slapping palms, and Google dancing with all the attendees. This is all well and good, for those members of that top subset of the pyramid. The problem is that while that very small percentage is being served well the VAST majority of people in the rest of the pyramid are being ignored. There are millions and millions of domains owned and operated by even more people than that, what percentage of this group attends these conferences? Because these people operate small sites, don’t have the connections, or don’t fly to out of town conferences doesn’t mean they should be ignored when it comes to assistance.

Up until very recently all information coming from them has been that they are working hard on improving Webmaster communications. Having been in the corporate culture before I know it can take a committee of ten people to decide what time it is, so I was willing to give them some leeway on the implementation of such systems. When I received notice that they were complacent and satisfied with their level of communication, I was more than disillusioned, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed for myself for being taken in on such a campaign of disinformation. At that point all of the broken promises, the painfully long anticipated tools that just never came, all started to make sense. They really have no intention on ever helping the rest of the pyramid; it’s not on the corporate radar. If it was a better system sure could have instituted by now.

To me I also noticed a change of culture. Back when Vanessa Fox was the public face of the Google Webmaster relations team any interview, post, or discussion you saw her involved in was one of taking suggestions well. No matter how whacky the request she would usually respond that she’d look into it, or that they are already working on something similar. Since her departure not only has the level of communication dwindled down to nearly nothing, but with responses as I received which are defensive and stand-offish don’t give me the feeling that its going to get any better.

Anyone reading this already knows about all of the wonderful documentation Google provides in their help center, the Webmaster guidelines, and even the group FAQs. They even posted a sticky on each subgroup to read the FAQ, but yet people still think their question is unique and needs someone attention. We also probably all subscribe to the same feeds looking for gems of information that Googlers drop all the time in the most popular SEO and SEM blogs and forums. With all of this information out there people are still going to search information from Google.

I’m not asking Google to go to the point of service where they are answering site-specific questions about ranking, or even divulging any secret information. What I do think is that they should offer someone, even if it’s just one person, to at least occasionally verify the information that is publicly available. You, me, Webado, Sebastian, or any of the other regulars in the group can answer a question 100% accurately but it does not carry the weight of a Googler chiming in every once and a while simply saying, “Yeah, what she said.” People searching out information are funneled to the help group, though they no longer mention Googlers involvement in much of their sites, expecting answers from Google and I think those people deserve at least 10 seconds of someone’s time.

So why did I say goodbye? Because Google and I have different philosophies. They feel it’s more important to service the big guns in the industry and I think it’s more important to have some boots on the ground working with the real heart of the web. Without Google support of the help group it’s just another webmaster forum of many, and not a good one at that, it lacks a user friendly interface, moderators, and many options that existing forums already offer. Their only appeal was the Official status, and without that I lost interest.