Tuesday, March 07, 2023
The Search Central Community is an online forum where site owners can help each other troubleshoot issues around their site's presence on Google Search, discuss various Search updates, and share tips on improving their site's visibility on Search.
2022 was a great year for our community. With over 9 million unique users and 32,000 threads posted across 17 languages last year, the community has not only been an important place for site owners to learn about and tackle Search issues—but also for Google to improve its systems based on the issues surfaced here.
The community further evolved as a place for announcements on product issues, updates and outages from Googlers and our Product Experts. 2022 also had the return of in-person summits to gather Product Experts from around the world.
Celebrating our Product Experts
We are quite fortunate to have many Product Experts who are passionate about Google Search and enjoy helping other users.
Our Product Experts regularly share valuable feedback that helps us identify and address issues to improve Search for site owners. Highlights include community feedback that helped us resolve multiple Sitemap and URL Removal tool issues in Search Console, and remove multiple networks of hacked sites in various languages like Turkish and Chinese.
Our Product Experts also contributed a wealth of knowledge to help users in the forums. Some of the highlights include:
- Sharing know-how on handling common site owner issues like Troubleshooting 'Couldn't Fetch' errors in the Sitemaps Report, FAQs on common Sitemap errors in multiple communities like Spanish and Russian, Understanding how site: search operator works, and Understanding SEO and how to promote sites better
- Creating public tools for Search Console data analysis and Sitemap generation
- Presenting on SEO topics at multiple events like the Search Central Unconference, SEO on the beach, and Business Matching Day
- Publishing help articles like Understanding the spam update, addressing indexing issues, videos to address Index coverage issues, Service Worker issues with Search, and SEO podcasts
We also couldn't have had smooth launches for many features and reports in Search Console like the new URL Inspection API, GA4 in Search Console, Video Indexing report and many more without the valuable feedback from our Product Experts.
Product Expert Summits
To thank our Product Experts, we hosted Product Expert Summits in three locations including New York in June, Dublin in September, and Singapore in December with our Platinum and Diamond Product Experts joining in-person and our Gold Product Experts joining online.
We had around 120 experts join us for 10 Search-specific breakout sessions across all three summits. The sessions covered a variety of topics including new features in Search Console, How Structured Data is ingested, Video Indexing in Search among others. Attendees reported positive feedback on the quality and technical nature of the sessions. Many Product Experts also mentioned the opportunity to engage in-person with other Product Experts and Googlers as a key reason for their joining the event.
We also took this unique opportunity to celebrate our experts with an award ceremony during the summits where our Experts Lino Uruñuela and Le Van Phu received the Troubleshooter award in recognition of their ability to take on complex problems. Mohamed El Oueryaghly received the Extra Mile award for going above and beyond in helping other users, while Daniel Ulczyk and Suzuki Kenichi received the Mentor award to recognize their efforts in guiding many other experts in the program.
Throughout the year, we also hosted multiple hangouts for our Product Experts on product updates and general Q&A where they can raise questions and provide feedback on both Google Search as well as the Product Experts program.
Interested in joining the Search Central Community to help other users, learn more about different aspects of Google Search, and participate in early feature releases for Search Console? You can sign up for the Product Experts program.