When a company as big and far-reaching as Google puts out a call for feedback you can almost guarantee they’ll get a response. So that’s why it should come as no surprise that the Mountain View search company has received a large response to their request for thoughts on how to make their Webmaster Help better.

In an entry on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Riona MacNamara of the Webmaster Tools team had this to say about the feedback so far:

I’m amazed at the webmaster community and your willingness to share your thoughts with us: thank you!

Here’s a selection of what we’re hearing:

You want Help to be more discoverable

• It’s not as easy as it should be to find the information you’re looking for. You’d like Google to do a better job of surfacing the answers to the most common questions. The browse structure doesn’t make it easy for users to find help, and sometimes search depends on users knowing exactly the right term to search for.
• You like the idea of context-sensitive help - on-the-spot assistance (often shown in a tooltip that appears when you hover over an item) that doesn’t require you to click to a different Help page.
• Right now, it’s not clear when new Help information - or new features - are added, and you’d like Google to look at calling these out.

You want Help to be more useful

• You’d like Google to look at adding videos and graphics
• You’d like us to providing the kind of information that’s relevant to the average webmaster, who may not have a deep knowledge of SEO techniques. You’re looking for good and understandable answers to common questions.
• You’d like us to expand the actual content, and do a much better job in explaining potential reasons why sites may have dropped the rankings.

It’s one thing to listen to feedback. It’s quite another to act on it. To that end, MacNamara says to look for these and other changes to roll-out in the Webmaster Help section of the site in the coming weeks.

I like the sound of that.

Google does a decent job of giving webmasters site-specific information in their Webmaster Tools service (much better information, I’ll admit, that any other search engine). But a more complete, easy-to-use help section would greatly improve people’s understanding of just how Google fits into the whole webmaster paradigm.

Even though I’m not a fan of Google (or any search engine) dictating policy to webmasters, I’m glad to see that the current leader of Internet traffic is planning on a better explanation of of how that traffic is earned. As frustrating as it might be, we almost have to take Google into account when building on the web.

So thanks, Webmaster Tools team… I look forward to your improvements!