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:

Top Search Queries feature for Webmaster Central

January

  • Made preparations for our big debut (see February)

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

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

October

November

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!