\n plans for this year, but we thought we’d take a moment to reflect on 2006. We had a great year
\n building communication with you, the webmaster community, and creating tools based on your
\n feedback. Many on the team were able to come out to conferences and met some of you in person, and
\n we’re looking forward to meeting many more of you in 2007. We’ve also had great conversations and
\n gotten valuable feedback in our
\n discussion forum<\/a>,
\n and we hope this blog has been helpful in providing information to you.\n<\/p>\n
\n We said goodbye to the \n Our most popular post was about the Here’s some of what we did last year.<\/p>\n \n We expanded into \n We lauched \n We met many of you at the \n We launched \n We got a whole new look and \n We also added a comprehensive \n We met more of you at the \n Matt talked about the \n We talked to many of you at \n Matt introduced you to our new search evangelist, \n We spent some time with some of you in our hometown at \n We launched user surveys, to learn more about how you interact with Webmaster Tools. We \n Yahoo! Stores incorporated Sitemaps<\/a> We expanded into Polish<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n We began supporting the \n We had a great time talking to many of you about international issues at \n August was an exciting month for us, as we l \n In addition, I took over the GoodKarma podcast on webmasterradio for \n We \n We provided a way for you to \n We launched \n And you could hear Matt being interviewed in a \n We launched sitemaps.org<\/a>, for \n We also started notifying you if we \n Partied with lots of you at “Safe Bets with Google” at \n We introduced you to our new Sitemaps support engineer,
\n Sitemaps blog<\/a>
\n and launched this broader blog in August. And after doing so, our number of unique monthly
\n visitors more than doubled. Thanks! We got much of our non-Google traffic from other webmaster
\n community blogs and forums, such as the
\n Search Engine Watch blog<\/a>,
\n Google Blogoscoped<\/a>, and
\n WebmasterWorld<\/a>. In December,
\n seomoz.org<\/a> and the new
\n Searchengineland.com<\/a>
\n were our biggest non-Google referrers. And social networking sites such as
\n digg.com<\/a>,
\n reddit,com<\/a>,
\n del.icio.us<\/a>, and
\n slashdot.org<\/a> sent
\n Webmaster Tools many of our visitors, and a blog by somebody named
\n Matt Cutts<\/a> sent a lot of
\n referrers our way as well. And these are the top Google queries that visitors clicked on:\n<\/p>\n![\"referring](\"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/kb-gorsel\/g-a3932b79a821.png\")
<\/p>\n
\n Googlebot activity reports and crawl rate control<\/a>
\n that we launched in October, followed by details about
\n how to authenticate Googlebot<\/a>.
\n We have only slightly more Firefox users (46.28%) than Internet Explorer users (46.25%). 89% of
\n you use Windows. After English, our readers most commonly speak French, German, Japanese, and
\n Spanish. And after the United States, our readers primarily come from the UK, Canada, Germany,
\n and France.\n<\/p>\nJanuary<\/h2>\n
\n Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish<\/a>.
\n You could hear
\n Matt on webmaster radio<\/a>.\n<\/p>\nFebruary<\/h2>\n
\n several new features<\/a>,
\n including:\n<\/p>\n\n
\n Google Sitemaps lunch at SES NY.<\/a>
\n You could hear
\n me on webmaster radio<\/a>.\n<\/p>\nMarch<\/h2>\n
\n a few more features<\/a>, including:\n<\/p>\n\n
April<\/h2>\n
\n added yet more features,<\/a>
\n such as:\n<\/p>\n\n
meta<\/code> tag verification<\/li>\n
\n webmaster help center<\/a>
\n and expanded the
\n webmaster guidelines<\/a>
\n from 10 languages to 18.\n<\/p>\n
\n Google Sitemaps lunch at Boston Pubcon<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n new caching proxy<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n SES Toronto<\/a>.\n<\/p>\nMay<\/h2>\n
\n Adam Lasnik<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n Search Engine Watch Live Seattle<\/a> and over
\n at
\n SES London<\/a>.\n<\/p>\nJune<\/h2>\n
\n expanded some of our features<\/a>,
\n such as:\n<\/p>\n\n
\n for subdirectories\n <\/li>\nAdsbot-Google<\/code> to the robots.txt analysis tool<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n for their merchants.\n<\/p>\nJuly<\/h2>\n
<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noodpt\" \/><\/code> tag to allow you
\n to
\n opt out of using Open Directory<\/a>
\n titles and descriptions for your site in the search results.\n<\/p>\n
\n SES Latino in Miami<\/a>.\n<\/p>\nAugust<\/h2>\n
\n aunched webmaster central<\/a>!
\n As part of that, we renamed Google Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools, expanded our Google Group to
\n include all types of webmaster topics, and expanded the help content in our webmaster help
\n center. We also
\n launched some new features<\/a>,
\n including:\n<\/p>\n\n
\n two shows<\/a>
\n (one all about
\n Buffy the Vampire Slayer!<\/a>)
\n and we met even more of you at the
\n Google Webmaster Central lunch at SES San Jose<\/a>.\n<\/p>\nSeptember<\/h2>\n
\n improved reporting of the cache date<\/a>
\n in search results.\n<\/p>\n
\n authenticate Googlebot<\/a>. And we started
\n updating query stats<\/a> more often and for a
\n shorter timeframe.\n<\/p>\nOctober<\/h2>\n
\n several new features<\/a>,
\n such as:\n<\/p>\n\n
\n podcast.<\/a>\n<\/p>\nNovember<\/h2>\n
\n joint support of the Sitemaps protocol<\/a>
\n between us, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.\n<\/p>\n
\n flagged your site for badware<\/a>
\n and if you’re an English news publisher included in Google News, we made News Sitemaps available
\n to you.\n<\/p>\n
\n Pubcon Las Vegas<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n Maile Ohye<\/a>, and our first
\n webmaster trends analyst,
\n Jonathan Simon<\/a>.\n<\/p>\nDec<\/h2>\n