Looking back on 2007
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Written by Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools Team
2007 has been a great year of change and growth for the Webmaster Central team. Without the webmaster community helping us drive our vision to create better tools we wouldn't have accomplished much. All of us with the Webmaster Central team would like to say a big thank you to everyone! Before we look ahead to 2008 and begin to incorporate your feedback from the blog posts and discussion groups, we would like to take a minute to reflect upon some of our bigger feats of the last twelve months.
Our blog has been very active since its launch in August 2006, and we hope you've found it helpful. For those who are new readers, you can find useful information about our Webmaster Tools updates here, as well as articles on how to make your sites more search engine-friendly and user-friendly. Outside of the US, we have readers from the UK, France, Canada, India and Germany, just to name a few—it just goes to show what a big and widespread community you are! In fact, we also have a dedicated group of readers for our Webmaster Central German and China blogs. For those keeping track, 47.28% of you are using Firefox to read our blog and 45.06% are using Internet Explorer, and our most popular post this past December answered your questions on meta tags and web search. Here's a snapshot of what our top search queries look like for December:
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
October
November
December
It was a busy year, but we had a lot of fun. I hope you'll stick with us as we embark on more great adventures in 2008. Remember, you can always reach out to us through our discussion group or at various search conferences throughout the year and around the globe!
2007 has been a great year of change and growth for the Webmaster Central team. Without the webmaster community helping us drive our vision to create better tools we wouldn't have accomplished much. All of us with the Webmaster Central team would like to say a big thank you to everyone! Before we look ahead to 2008 and begin to incorporate your feedback from the blog posts and discussion groups, we would like to take a minute to reflect upon some of our bigger feats of the last twelve months.
Our blog has been very active since its launch in August 2006, and we hope you've found it helpful. For those who are new readers, you can find useful information about our Webmaster Tools updates here, as well as articles on how to make your sites more search engine-friendly and user-friendly. Outside of the US, we have readers from the UK, France, Canada, India and Germany, just to name a few—it just goes to show what a big and widespread community you are! In fact, we also have a dedicated group of readers for our Webmaster Central German and China blogs. For those keeping track, 47.28% of you are using Firefox to read our blog and 45.06% are using Internet Explorer, and our most popular post this past December answered your questions on meta tags and web search. Here's a snapshot of what our top search queries look like for December:
- Made preparations for our big debut (see February)
February
- Moved Webmaster Tools officially out of beta
- Traveled the globe and met with webmasters like you at conferences in Australia and London
- Launched the external and internal links feature in Webmaster Tools to make it easier for you to learn about your links
March
- Extended anchor text information to show the entire phrase sites use to link to you (not just individual words)
- Posted some helpful articles about robots.txt
- Kicked off a new blog for German webmasters
April
- Met with more of you at SES New York
- Added URL removal to Webmaster Tools
May
- Shared some useful tips on how webmasters can make use of Google's newly unveiled universal search
- Met with webmasters like you at conferences in China, Italy, New York and San Jose
June
- Revamped the Help Center to make it easier for everyone to find the content they need
- Reached out to webmasters at conferences in Seattle, Santa Clara and Toronto
July
- Unveiled the Message Center, a key component in helping us keep in touch with you!
- Improved Sitemap feedback to help you identify important issues in your Sitemaps
- Launched a Webmaster Central blog in China
- Enabled non-English domain names in Webmaster Tools
- Chatted with you at SES San Jose
- Updated Webmaster Tool's feature to help you analyze your robots.txt files
- Updated Webmaster Tools:
- Introduced Subscriber stats
- Revamped the UI
- Added support for 2 new languages: Romanian & Turkish
October
- Went all out for Halloween in true Google fashion
- Launched new features in Webmaster Tools—and a lot of them:
- Sitemap updates: cross-submissions and Code Search Sitemaps
- Top search queries—for the last 6 months!
- Sitelinks feature to help you identify the ones you have and help you get rid of the ones you don't like
- Set your geographic target to help your users find you more easily in country-specific searches
- Improved data freshness to keep you better informed about your site's performance
November
- Highlighted terrific webmasters in the discussion group and introduced Googlers ready to answer your questions in 11 non-English languages.
- Made it easier for Go Daddy users to access our tools
- Produced some helpful videos featuring our very own Matt Cutts on the anatomy of a search result and how to use ALT attributes intelligently
December
- Another Webmaster Tools update loaded with new features:
- Improved Sitemap summary pages to help you identify issues in your Sitemaps
- Content analysis
- Video Sitemaps
- Added support for 2 new languages: Czech and Hungarian
- Attended PubCon in Las Vegas and SES Chicago
It was a busy year, but we had a lot of fun. I hope you'll stick with us as we embark on more great adventures in 2008. Remember, you can always reach out to us through our discussion group or at various search conferences throughout the year and around the globe!