Google’s State of the Index

Matt Cutts released a State of the Google Index post on his blog a couple days ago based on his talk at the PubCon Event is Las Vegas last week.

I thought it was very valuable, but it’s about 23 minutes long so I’ve decided to spare you the time and summarized it for you. Here is the link the the video on YouTube.

A Look Back at Google in 2008

For Search Engine Marketeers & Users:

1. Release of Google Chrome
2. Android: Mobile Operating System
3. Google Suggest
4. SearchWiki
5. Google Ad Manager/Ad Planner
6. Video & voice chat in GMail
7. Improved personalization/universal search
8. Improved machine translation
9. Improved voice recognition

For webmasters:

1. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for PDF docs
2. Better crawling of Flash sites via Adobe API’s
3. Better recognition of keyword spam & gibberish
4. Better processing of Javascript
5. Now showing URL’s of links to 404 pages on your site
6. Help with custom 404 pages using Google’s Javascript
7. Advanced segmentation in Google Analytics
8. On-demand indexing for Google custom search engines
9. More webmaster API’s
10. Translation gadget for your site

More webmaster communications:

1. Three webmaster chats (700+ people on the last one)
2. Release of Google Website Optimizer blog
3. Addition of Chinese, German & Spanish Webmaster blogs
4. More videos in German, Spanish & Polish
5. Messages that wait for you to register your site
6. Messages to notify sites that are hackable
7. Release of a Beginner’s SEO Guide – Google doesn’t hate SEO!

Google’s 2009 Forecast of Search Trends

Bad:

1. Continuation of Black Hat SEO spam
2. Continuation of Black Hat SEO hacking tactics
3. Black Hat SEO moves towards illegal activities.
4. SEO’s will weigh the risk of using Black Hat SEO & tolerance

Good:

1. Google will continue to improve its current products
2. Google will continue to release new products & tools
3. Google will continue to communicate with webmasters

Photo Credit: mnadi on Flickr