Search Engine Roundtable's 21st Anniversary

Ser Birthday Cake 21

Today marks the 21st year anniversary of when I started this site, the Search Engine Roundtable. I was 23 years old when I started this site, compiling what the search community and search industry was talking about and for almost half of my life now, I've been still doing the same thing, day in and day out.

I've been writing about search, Google, Bing, SEO, PPC for now over two decades. More importantly, I've been doing it consistently every workday, several times per day, no matter how I feel, for 21 straight years. It still amazes me that I am still able to find several new topics to cover every single day at this site, no matter how niche and specialized our industry is. I mean, it shouldn't surprise me anymore, but sometimes it does but I think it is easy because we have so many people sharing their knowledge openly with their colleagues and competitors, so I have plenty of topics to cover here.

This past year, on January 1, 2024, we launched version 5 of the Search Engine Roundtable. We had some kinks early on but it seems to be doing well.

21 Years Of Passion:

21 years ago today, I started this site as a way to keep notes on what the search marketing community was talking about. A roundtable of discussions, if you will, between the smartest search marketing minds. Finding new tests and concepts that most have not yet seen. To bring those topics and findings to a larger number of search marketers. That passion and that mission have not changed.

I still continue to publish several stories here a day and on Search Engine Land. I still produce my weekly video recaps, please subscribe to the YouTube channel. While I paused the search vlog where I try to bring more attention to new and maybe old individuals in our community, I started an almost daily search news brief video named It's New with Crystal Carter, Mordy Oberstein and Greg Finn. I also publish these videos on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast player. Don't forget about the fun daily photos and big monthly Google webmaster reports. These are all aimed at saving you time while catching you up on new topics and making you smile at the same time.

If you want, you can read last year's recap - the 20th year anniversary of the Search Engine Roundtable as well.

Our Growth & Analytics:

I still find using GA4 confusing but based on what I am seeing, overall traffic and pageviews are up about 5% this past year compared to the past year. This is while search traffic to this site dropped almost 15%, yea, Google has not treated this site too well but it wasn't that this site was hit by some sort of algorithmic penalty like many have, it is just search doesn't seem to send as much traffic as it use to. Like I said, overall traffic is up about 5% even while organic search traffic took a beating.

So what is up so much when organic search died? Direct traffic is up 4%, social traffic was even (not up or down), email was up big with an 85% increase, referral was up 120%, video up 20%, and there was a big jump in "unassigned" traffic. So other channels are up a lot - thankfully.

Desktop traffic was 58%, mobile was 40% and tablet was 2% - these numbers seem to stay around the same level each year. Traffic from the US is up 20%, India up 10%, UK, Canada, Germany and France about the same. 35% of the readers are female and 65% are male, according to GA4.

There are now about 38,500 stories on this site; I wrote about 35,650, which is about 93% of them. I published just under 2,000 stories this year alone! We also had about 35,0000 comments posted this year on the published stories (that is about an 85% increase in the comments), so thank you for all who comment - I do read them all and do my best to deal with spam. If you count up all my stories, here, Search Engine Land and the old days at Search Engine Watch, I have now written over 45,000 (closer to 46,000) articles on search.

With YouTube, my channel - please subscribe has over 1,600 new subscribers (now at ~18,500 subscribers). There are over 6.8 million views on those videos, with over 78,000 hours of watch time. Oh, and I made just over $1,300 in YouTube ad revenue in the past year, which is $300 more than last year's revenue. However, if you watch, you will see I have video sponsors now - thank you, sponsors!

Most Important Stories In Past 12 Months:

This site has always been hyper focused on the Google search ranking algorithm updates and volatility, so there is a lot of that posted below. We had three core updates this year, the November 2024 core update, the August 2024 core update and the largest core update Google ever released (according to Google), the March 2024 core update. With the March core update, Google did away with the helpful content update, which continued to plaque many content creators over the past 12+ months (a whole section on that below) while Reddit got special treatment. We also had several other Google updates in 2024, including the June 2024 spam update, March 2024 spam update (and policy updates), the November 2023 reviews update finished within the past 12 months, a deepfakes update, a starkly different content update and other unconfirmed updates as listed below.

Google unleashed a ton of new spam policies, including the new site reputation abuse policy, which was recently updated to broaden the scope of that policy, it is still being enforced manually. We had Google executives and representatives go on record and be questioned about search quality issues, AI in Search, the helpful content issue and issues with content creators, it was a wild year.

Google launched AI Overviews, replacing SGE, and expanded it to 100+ countries. Early on, it had a lot of quality issues, but that was mostly (not fully) fixed. Google announced many Gemini improvements and upgrades. Google had many search bugs, with a weird teetering weekend ranking issue, plus tons of other ranking, serving and indexing bugs - all documented below.

Google had its massive search leak, which it eventually confirmed. Google responded to some of the DOJ leaks around Navboost and other topics. Google updated its search quality raters document and revised its SEO starter guide. Plus, I posted countless SEO topics and ad topics over the year.

Not to be outdone by Google, Bing launched its generative search experience, also launched deep search a couple of times, and made many improvements to Copilot over the year. OpenAI launched search in ChatGPT, and they also made countless improvements to ChatGPT. Apple finally launched Apple Intelligence and while the demos look impressive and integrate with other AI services, it has not been fully rolled out yet.

Google said it would eventually remove the disavow tool from Google Search Console, they removed the mobile friendly tool and usability report, and also removed the page experience report. Google Search Console recommendations is rolled out to few, plus a ton of other Search Console features and changes were made. Bing Webmaster Tools finally gained 16 months of data, while adding a number of new tools and features over the year.

Google dropped its continuous scroll feature, dropped the cache feature but added the Wayback Machine. Google added a web only link, replaced perspectives for forums, moved the results count, and finally got rid of the search notes feature. Google is doing a lot around DMA in European regions.

Google Ads began doing stuff with AI, including spotting ads in AI Overviews finally. Google updated its definition of top ads, while testing mixing ads and organic results as dynamic ad placement. Google is also test to delete ad data 11 years or older. Google also finished its roll out of the new ads interface. Microsoft Advertising also did AI in ads with Copilot in Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft Advertising also has a new interface and they also seem to be mixing ads and organic results.

On the local side, Google confirmed openness is a ranking factor. Google shut down Google Business Profile websites. Apple Maps launched a web interface, and so much more on the local side.

On the business end, Google was ruled a monopoly (big news) and it may lead to Google being broken up. Nick Fox replaced Prabhakar Raghavan as head of Google Search. Liz Read took the head of Search too (different role) with other leadership changes. Microsoft replaced its head of Search and Ads Mikhail Parakhin with Mustafa Suleyman.

Here are the top stories by category (I hope I have not missed some):

Google Core Updates:

Other Google Updates:

Google Helpful Content Update:

Unconfirmed Google Search Updates/Volatility:

Google Communication On Algorithm Update Improvements:

Google Site Reputation Abuse:

Spam:

Google AI Overviews & AI:

Google Search Bugs:

Bing Deep Search & Copilot:

Other AI Search:

Google Search Console & Merchant Center:

Bing & Bing Webmaster Tools:

SEO:

Structured Data & Schema:

Search Features & Interface Changes:

Google Ads:

Microsoft Advertising:

Local Search & Google Business Profiles:

Industry & Business:

Most Viewed Stories In Past 12 Months:

Here are the most viewed stories in the past 12 months that were published in 2024 based on Google Analytics (GA4):

Looking Forward To 2025:

Last year I said I thought we'd see a lot more helpful content updates, well, I was partially wrong. We saw the helpful content update integrated into the core update, with three new core updaters, tons of new spam policies and a lot more around algorithm changes. We did see a lot more talk about what helpful content is and maybe that Google might be getting it wrong. I think Google will work harder on this issue going forward and continue to refine its algorithms to do better here.

AI has been big last year and will continue to be a big deal. I am looking forward to seeing what Google does, what Bing does but more so what Apple does with Apple Intelligence, what OpenAI does with search in ChatGPT, what Perplexity will continue to do and who else comes in this space. Ultimately, I think Google will continue to win out but who knows, I've been wrong a lot.

It will continue to be a wild, ever changing and exciting year in Search, SEO and Ads.

Thank You:

As I said last year, I deeply appreciate and 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. Everyone stay safe and healthy! Thank you,

Barry Schwartz

21 Years Covering The Search Industry

Barry Schwartz / Executive Editor

21 Years Of Passion:

Our Growth & Analytics:

Most Important Stories In Past 12 Months:

Most Viewed Stories In Past 12 Months:

Looking Forward To 2025:

Thank You:

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