Kaspar Szymanski, a Googler responsible for webmaster outreach and a downright awesome guy, posted on Google+ some of the highlights for his team in 2011. He wrote he wanted to share his personal thoughts on the top outreach accomplishments for Google in 2011.
Let me sum them up for you:
- Authorship markup option is one of his favorites.
- Surprisingly he mentions Panda, but he does so for good reason, explaining "I've seen a number of threads from webmasters who claimed their legit, content rich sites have been slammed by Panda. Now, I only have a limited insight into our forums escalations, as I don’t speak all the languages we support but from what I've seen the vast majority of sites that have been escalated has not been affected by this algorithmic update. Some were experiencing technical issues, others' performance in #Google #Search was just not living up to the webmasters expectation. Now, I'm not saying our algorithms are always perfect right from the beginning and surely some fine-tuning had to be done but the bottom line is that users seemed to love post-Panda results and that's what counts for me."
- A new design for site links
- Multilingual content markup
- Spam in Google including phishing, malware, paid PageRank passing links with ways to report it.
- Transparency and two way communication via Webmaster Tools, forums, Google Hangouts, and more.
What do you think?
Forum discussion on Google+.
