As many of you know, this site lives off of watching and reporting on the various SEO/SEM forums on the web. Much of that has watching has, over the years, been on the Google owned and operated forums. In the old days, Google didn't have webmaster communication forums, now they do and a lot of what we cover these days is from there.
As Google's forums grow, Google wants to measure the effectiveness of the forums and those who participate within them. At SES Chicago, I covered a keynote by Google's Maile Ohye where Maile discussed a bit on how they measure that.
She said that since Google loves to put data points on everything they do, they have a metric for measuring "webmaster happiness." I am not sure exactly what they call it at Google, but when I wrote about it at Search Engine Land, I called it the Webmaster Happiness Rank.
Using some datapoints found in the forums and likely on certain blogs Googlers track, Google comes up with a weekly metric to see how happy or sad webmasters are with Google. Maile said, each week they hope the metric improves.
I started a thread at the forum where Google would measure it, Google Webmaster Help, asking Webmasters to guess what those metrics would be made up of. Honestly, we can make educated guesses, but I'd love to see exactly what it is made up of.
Personally, I am all for this and heck, maybe I'll come up with my own metric and put a dial on this site somewhere, which I updated daily. I should have enough data points to do something similar. By the way, I do track tons of data on my business and then place them on dials for easy review.
But if you really wanted to know, you can always join Google. If you love to help webmasters and SEOs, are knowledgable in Google and web development, then you might be able to work for Google. I know Google is looking for a few new Webmaster Trends Analyst, primarily for their Zurich, Switzerland office. If you think you are a good fit, go apply. But if you get the job, you have to promise to hand over the webmaster happiness algorithm Google uses. :)
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
