Time goes by so fast sometimes its hard to get a handle on just what happened over the last 10 months. A member on Highrankings Forum has been away from SEO for sometime and is just getting back into the industry and wants to know what he missed in 2005. A lot of the members come to together to outline the year in review. Here is what they came up with that I have compiled and add too. Please feel free to comment and add to the list.
- Year of the Google
- Year of the Map
- Duplicate content penalities gets a very close look from SEO's
- Reciprocal links even less useful
- Page rank even less important but still a mystery for some
- Text links brokers and link builders either change or die with the times
- Even more variation in "what works" across different topic areas
- Even more ad money flowing into Adsense away from traditional advertising
- Google ranking algorithm updates eliminates more crud (scrapers suffer this year)
- Comment spam gets some notice and a group effort to erradicate
- Search engine spammers take to the streets and forums
- usual complaints about good content penalized and bad content rewarded
- However, good content continues to become a staple and reason for high rankings.
- Yahoo! begins to become a force in search.
- MSN Search debuts.
- Google continues an aging Delay that keeps new sites from being able to rank.
- Google begins starts to get serious about eliminating scraper sites/directories
- Search Engine Patents!
- Continual search engine updates, which are not so bad this year until Jaggar.
- A year ago, few people disliked Google. That has changed this year.
- Overall tilt towards paying more for better-qualified AdSense traffic
- General interest in search marketing continues to rise
- Patience and understanding from SEO clients is on a decline
