It's like I am celebrating my bar mitzvah again, well, I kind of am because this site is now 13-years old! I personally have been covering the search marketing industry on this site for 13 years now. And I say this every year, but the core of this site has not changed - we still cover what the industry is talking about. From Google algorithmic flutters to breaking news - we cover it if the industry is talking about it.
I try so hard to be consistent here - writing every work day on average five stories a day. If I travel or I am off on a Jewish holiday and don't have internet access, I make sure to schedule stories. Consistency is a critical piece for this site and my work in general. In fact, I was once about 15 minutes late to posting the Search Pic of the Day and someone sent me a direct message asking if I was okay.
In any event, you can read about the 12th birthday story and from there catch up on our other stories.
Overall, this year over last year, our traffic is up over 20% with pageviews up about the same and our unique users are up over 25%. This is with adding the iOS and Android apps, which is tracked under a different profile. Our mobile traffic is now over 25% of our traffic, up from 15% the previous year - honestly, I am surprised it is not higher. Our search traffic is up about 30%, social is up over 10%, and direct is up over 25%.
There are over 23,000 stories on this site, of which I wrote over 20,000 of them. In the past year, we wrote about 1,800 stories alone and we had over 16,500 non-spam comments on this site in the past year (over 126,000 comments in 13 years). So there is a lot of content here, some better than others. I really do enjoy most of the comments here, I know many of you skip them, but they make me laugh some of the time.
The weekly search video recaps are fun too. My YouTube channel shows over 1,200,000 minutes of watch time in total and 5.7 million video views in total. The videos in total have 5,500+ likes and 1,200 dislikes and about 5,000 comments. But we only have 3,500 YouTube subscribers, so go subscribe - although we do have an iTunes podcast also - and I don't track those. But in total, I made $182 in YouTube revenue on these videos - clearly, not a money maker but this site in general doesn't make that much money.
Most Important Stories In Past 12 Months:
Here is how I would define what are the most important stories over the past 12 months. They are about Penguin 4.0, the mobile-first index, AMP growing in influence, machine learning and structured data and then some algorithm updates. We also had AdWords remove ads from the right, go green and remove the keyword planner from many SEOs. Google lost their head of search, Amit Singhal and Google brought back the Google Dance. Here is the list, but I do hope I didn’t miss anything critical.
- Google Penguin 4.0, The Real Time Penguin Algorithm Is Live
- Google: Penguin Looks At The Page Where Your Links Come From (Link Source)
- Google Algorithms Labels Links As Penguin, Footer, Disavowed & More - Googlers Can Look Up Link Labels
- Google Launches Mobile-First Index Experiment: Here Is Everything We Know About It.
- Google Fully Launches The New Mobile Friendly Update
- RankBrain Used In All Google Searches & Impacts Search Results A Lot
- Google: There Is No RankBrain Score & You Don't Optimize For It
- Google AMP Goes Live Now
- Google Confirms: Google AMP Results Now Rolling Out
- The Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Coming January 10, 2017
- Google Fully Turns Off Feed To Toolbar PageRank
- Google AMP Trumps App Indexing In Google Mobile Search Results
- Google To Drop Mobile Friendly Label But Not The Ranking Factor
- Google Local Map Results Getting More Hyperlocal?
- Google Local Pack Results Algorithm & Ranking Update
- Google Search Live Coverage Carousel Pilot; Is This The Real Time Index?
- Listen To How Google Home Quotes Features Snippets
- Google Indexing HTTPS By Default
- Google's John Mueller Addresses Zombie Traffic Phenomenon
- The New Google Webmaster Guidelines Are Now Live
- Google Updated Quality Raters Guidelines Last Week
- It's Official: Google AdWords Labels Are Going Green
- Google Confirms Four Ads At The Top & Removing Right Side Ads
- Google Keyword Planner Removes Valuable Data For Potential Advertisers
- Google Defines Search Analytics Impressions, Position & Clicks
- Amit Singhal, The Head Of Google Search To Retire But Why?
- The Google Dance Was About Webmaster Relations
Most Viewed Stories In Past 12 Months:
Here are the most viewed stories in the past 12 months of 2016 based on Google Analytics:
- Google Analytics: Visits Now Sessions & Unique Visitors Now Users
- Google Penguin 4.0, The Real Time Penguin Algorithm Is Live
- Google To Update Their JavaScript Recommendations & Guidelines
- Google Confirms: Core Search Ranking Update Took Place But Not Penguin Related
- Early Signs Of A Google Core Search Algorithm Update
- Special Report: Massive Google Fluctuations Continue; Is It Penguin?
- Google Tests A Whiter Desktop Search Experience
- Google On Penguin 4.0: We Don't Have Any Dates To Announce
- Google Search Algorithm Update Chatter On Fire
- Google Launching Speed Test In Search Results
- Is Google Testing The Penguin 4.0 Algorithm?
2017 Recommendations:
Last year I said mobile is still important, which it was. I said spend time on App Indexing, which I think was bad advice since Google is now focusing more on AMP and PWAs. I did say spend time on AMP, and I strongly recommend that for 2017 and I also talked about voice search and personal assistants - all true for 2017.
But with the mobile-first index, mobile will become even more important. But we are getting more into machine learning and artificially intelligence, so look into featured snippets more and how Google talks about machine learning.
More importantly, thank you all so much for reading every day, commenting (or ignoring the comments) and for sharing the stories here. Keep up the chatter and let's build an even better search community this coming year.
