Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
The Year in Review
Friday, January 19, 2007
Welcome to 2007! The
webmaster central
team is very excited about our plans for this year, but we thought we'd take a moment to reflect on 2006. We had a great year building communication with you, the webmaster community, and creating tools based on your feedback. Many on the team were able to come out to conferences and met some of you in person, and we're looking forward to meeting many more of you in 2007. We've also had great conversations and gotten valuable feedback in our
discussion forum
, and we hope this blog has been helpful in providing information to you.
We said goodbye to the
Sitemaps blog
and launched this broader blog in August. And after doing so, our number of unique monthly visitors more than doubled. Thanks! We got much of our non-Google traffic from other webmaster community blogs and forums, such as the
Search Engine Watch blog
,
Google Blogoscoped
, and
WebmasterWorld
. In December,
seomoz.org
and the new
Searchengineland.com
were our biggest non-Google referrers. And social networking sites such as
digg.com
,
reddit,com
,
del.icio.us
, and
slashdot.org
sent webmaster tools many of our visitors, and a blog by somebody named
Matt Cutts
sent a lot of referrers our way as well. And these are the top Google queries that visitors clicked on:
Our most popular post was about the
Googlebot activity reports and crawl rate control
that we launched in October, followed by details about
how to authenticate Googlebot
. We have only slightly more Firefox users (46.28%) than Internet Explorer users (46.25%). 89% of you use Windows. After English, our readers most commonly speak French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. And after the United States, our readers primarily come from the UK, Canada, Germany, and France.
Here's some of what we did last year.
January
We expanded into
Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish
.
You could hear
Matt on webmaster radio
.
February
We lauched
several new features
, including:
robots.txt analysis tool
page with the highest PageRank by month
common words in your site's content and in anchor text to your site
We met many of you at the
Google Sitemaps lunch at SES NY.
You could hear
me on webmaster radio
.
March
We launched
a few more features
, including:
showing the top position of your site for your top queries
top mobile queries
download options for Sitemaps data, stats, and errors
April
We got a whole new look and
added yet more features,
such as:
meta tag verification
notification of violations to the webmaster guidelines
reinclusion request form and spam reporting form
indexing information (can we crawl your home page? is your site indexed?)
We also added a comprehensive
webmaster help center
and expanded the
webmaster guidelines
from 10 languages to 18.
We met more of you at the
Google Sitemaps lunch at Boston Pubcon
.
Matt talked about the
new caching proxy
.
We talked to many of you at
SES Toronto
.
May
Matt introduced you to our new search evangelist,
Adam Lasnik
.
We hung out with some of you in our hometown at
Search Engine Watch Live Seattle
and over at
SES London
.
June
We launched user surveys, to learn more about how you interact with webmaster tools.
We
expanded some of our features
, such as:
increased the number of crawl errors shown to 100% within the last two weeks
Increased the number of Sitemaps you can submit from 200 to 500
Expanded query stats so you can see them per property and per country and made them available for subdirectories
Increased the number of common words in your site and in links to your site from 20 to 75
Added Adsbot-Google to the robots.txt analysis tool
Yahoo! Stores incorporated Sitemaps
for their merchants.
July
We expanded into
Polish
.
We began supporting the <meta name="robots" content="noodpt"> tag to allow you to
opt out of using Open Directory
titles and descriptions for your site in the search results.
We had a great time talking to many of you about international issues at
SES Latino in Miami
.
August
August was an exciting month for us, as we l
aunched webmaster central
! As part of that, we renamed Google Sitemaps to webmaster tools, expanded our Google Group to include all types of webmaster topics, and expanded the help content in our webmaster help center. We also
launched some new features
, including:
Preferred domain control
Site verification management
Downloads of query stats for all subfolders
In addition, I took over the GoodKarma podcast on webmasterradio for
two shows
(one all about
Buffy the Vampire Slayer!
) and we met even more of you at the
Google Webmaster Central lunch at SES San Jose
.
September
We
improved reporting of the cache date
in search results.
We provided a way for you to
authenticate Googlebot
.
And we started
updating query stats
more often and for a shorter timeframe.
October
We launched
several new features
, such as:
Crawl rate control
Googlebot activity reports
Opting in to enhanced image search
Display of the number of URLs submitted via a Sitemap
And you could hear Matt being interviewed in a
podcast.
November
We launched
sitemaps.org
, for
joint support of the Sitemaps protocol
between us, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
We also started notifying you if we
flagged your site for badware
and if you're an English news publisher included in Google News, we made News Sitemaps available to you.
Partied with lots of you at "Safe Bets with Google" at
Pubcon Las Vegas
.
We introduced you to our new Sitemaps support engineer,
Maile Ohye
, and our first webmaster trends analyst,
Jonathan Simon
.
Dec
We met even more of you at the webmaster central lunch at
SES Chicago
.
Thanks for spending the year with us. We look forward to even more collaboration and communication in the coming year.
Hey!
Check here if your site is mobile-friendly.
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