Looking back on 2007

Thursday, January 03, 2008

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

• 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

August

• 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

September

• Updated
  Webmaster Tools:
  • Introduced Subscriber stats
  • Revamped the UI
  • Added support for 2 new languages: Romanian and 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!

Written by Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools Team