AndyA - 1:52 pm on Feb 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

I hope that Webmaster Tools is Google's way of helping legitimate webmasters make sure their sites are performing in the best way they possibly can. I was concerned about signing up as well, but I figured Google must know that spammers are always going to be identified by their lack of unique, original content.

A spammy site will never have original content that makes sense (isn't jibberish words stuck together in a mock paragraph). And legitimate sites will have content appear on them that doesn't appear anywhere else. That will identify a spam vs. non-spam site.

I would hope Webmaster Tools will eventually be expanded to include better communication from Google to the webmaster/owner. For instance, duplicate content alerts so we can fix them before they become a problem.

It's to Google's advantage to help legitimate webmasters improve their sites, as that will in turn improve Google's SERPs. We all know how many quality URLs on quality sites are buried somewhere, or ranked improperly due to silly errors or lack of knowledge on the part of the webmaster. How many good sites are penalized right now because of a forum issuing multiple session IDs? Or a server in a shared environment programmed wrong so it doesn't return 301s properly?

The average webmaster probably doesn't understand all this, and likely doesn't want to. So is it right to deprive others of good information on their site just because they aren't server techs?

I've learned more about htaccess, server environments, html coding, and related things due to issues with Google than I really ever wanted to know. It's been good in that I've fixed problems that I never guessed would be problems. But I've also not been adding to my site at the rate I would have liked to, due to the time spent learning how to fix these problems. So I lose, my visitors lose, and Google loses because there are hundreds of new, unique, original content pages still waiting to be created and published.

I hope Google expands Webmaster Tools and improves communication, it will only benefit everyone if they do. Spammers will never be helped by this, because they will never build sites with original, unique content. If they did, they would no longer be spammers.