What Happened In Search Marketing in 2005?

October 26, 2005

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