Matt Cutts Discusses The State Of Google’s Index

Matt Cutts has another SEO related video presentation where he discusses what Google did for webmasters in 2008 and what he sees happening more and more in 2009. To spoil the movie, future predictions mostly deal with where blackhat search engine optimization is headed and it looks really nasty. Think Al Capone and his scuzzy buddy Bugsy.
At any rate, the video is interesting and if you can sit through 23 minutes of Matt Cutts boring you with dry talk of what Google has done then I’d recommend taking a look just to see if you find anything you didn’t already know. A small recap – and this isn’t everything he discusses – appears below. These are just a few of the topics that are worth mentioning because Google actually did produce something worth talking about:

• Optical Character Recognition for PDF files
• Google Trends
• Android
• Flash crawl
• List of sites that link to 404 pages
• Google Chrome
• Google Analytics advertiser segmentation

These are products and services that Google rolled out in 2008 that are worth looking into more. If you haven’t heard of these then you should look into more information about them. There is plenty more that Matt Cutts talks about.
The top 3 most important Google developments, in my opinion, in the last year are:

• Google Trends
• OCR for PDF files
• Android

I think these are important because Google Trends will allow advertisers to monitor important trends in a variety of industries, but the tool can also be used by journalists, researchers, and anyone who has an interest in measuring aggregated human behavior. OCR for PDF documents is important because now Google can actually crawl PDFs, whereas before they couldn’t. This will become more important for SEO as the technology is improved. Android is an open source developer’s tool that allows anyone to create mobile applications and because of this technology and some others entering the market today I think mobile advertising will pick up speed.