14 DAY TRIAL // Google is introducing a new way of getting to know its Webmaster Tools by providing them with lessons and practical examples rather than stacks of documentation. Inspired by the recent surge in educational sites, Google introduced the Webmaster Academy.
"Looking through all of the information in Webmaster Central can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re just getting started with a website. This is why we’re excited to introduce a new set of educational materials in a program called Webmaster Academy," Google explained.
"Webmaster Academy provides practical and easy-to-understand lessons for beginner webmasters to help you improve your site with topics like getting your site in our index, providing search engines with helpful information about your video and image content, and understanding Webmaster Tools features," it said.
The idea is to help webmasters familiarize themselves with all the tools Google offers while trying them out. Google's obviously interested in more people knowing how to use the tools at their disposal as better optimized sites make for better results and easier ranking.
The lessons don't assume anything and start out with the most basic "Learn how Google works." There's general stuff about Google, how search works and how results are ranked and similar topics. There's more specific stuff about Webmaster Tools as well, but it's still pretty basic stuff.
However, if you start reading through some of the topics, you'll find more documentation on more advanced topics once you're through. One of the advantages of Webmaster Academy is that most of the topics are accompanied by YouTube videos.
Most webmasters won't find too many new things in the Webmaster Academy, but the site is not aimed at experienced users, but rather at those just getting started managing their sites, the ones that are most in need of knowledge.