2009 has passed – time to take a look at how the Googleindex has changed in 2009. Just like last year, I will show both the winners and losers for 2009, based on the SISTRIX Visibilityindex. I will also highlight and comment on interesting developments – especially if they involve more than one domain. This blogpost will start with the Googleindex winners of 2009:

Quality Pays Off
While last year, we had quite a few scrapers and rather unconventional “content-aggregators” on the winning side, there has been a noticeable decline in the number of such domains in this list for 2009. While there may still be some exceptions here, like the social-bookmarking-site publishr.de or cylex-telefonbuch.de, which have a rather questionable added value for the displayed data-quality. Though all things considered, this year's list is better than last year's. We can only speculate on how much user-behavior played any role in this but the consensus is that quality pages are by far easier to optimize.

Optimization for Brandnames
Even though the competition for generic terms like “credit” or “cell phone” has been plenty and will probably only get more heated since the Brand-update shortly before Christmas, this usually looks a lot different for the brandnames with the most traffic. A multitude of sites on the winning side seem to have used just that to their advantage this year by targeting those visitors that type in brandnames into Google. The actual brand will probably take the top spot and most of the traffic but the rest of the visitors will usually have rather high conversion-rates which also makes them popular. tageszeitung-24.de is a nice example for this: the domain ranks within the top-10 for a number of newspapers (“dresdner morgenpost”, “coburger tageblatt” or the “neumarkter tagblatt”) and also offers appropriate newspaper-subscriptions.

Existing Content Gets Optimized
Seeing how the large publishing houses have, by now, made most of the content from their online-presences available for Google – which are also ranking quite well – 2009 also saw a number of smaller publishing houses and content-producers follow suit. Two domains from this list are exemplary, schoener-wohnen.de and gabler.de: the first domain is already ranking for terms like bathroom (1), living (5) and tables (8), while the second domain – a publishing house for professional literature – can even be found in front of Wikipedia with their economic-lexicon for keywords like “gains tax” (2) or “double accounting” (1).

SEO is Expensive
The days in which a bright guy could take a whole e-commerce site and push it to the top by himself and with little costs are over: today, the contested terms often need a SEO-team that works on tasks like onpage-optimization, linkpurchase creation of added value, which people link to freely and other SEO-tasks to get ahead. Monthly budgets in the five- or six-figure range are no exceptions anymore – money that has to be generated again, which is shown nicely by the number of e-commerce-domains that are on the winning side.