Search Engine Roundtable's 9th Year Anniversary

Search Engine Roundtable 9th Birthday Logo Today would be the official 9th birthday of the Search Engine Roundtable. That means I've been writing about search, SEO, the industry and related topics for 9 years - which is about 28% of my life writing about search. It shocks me how I am able to find new nuggets of information, several of them, each day to share here. Truth is, without the community, it would not be possible.

As you know, the original niche for this site was to report what was going in within the community through the discussion forums. That mission is what has made this site so successful over the years and we have not budged from it at all.

Thank you all for reading, commenting, and helping me create this content on a daily basis - thank you!

Stats:

This year we had well over 610,000 pageviews on average every month - that is over 100,000 more pageviews per month than last year. Of that, 400,000 plus were unique visitors per month, that is also up from last year by 100,000 unique visitors. We posted over 1,600 stories, with 50 video posts, with about 15,000 real comments from the community. Our pageviews is up over 20% from last year, unique visits are up over 60%, with mobile traffic up by over 60% from the year before. Our most popular browsers are Internet Explorer with 40%, Chrome with 25%, Firefox with 20% and Safari with 6%. On the mobile front iOS is 66% and is only Android is 29% of the mobile browser traffic on this site. Our YouTube channel is just shy of 5 million video views to date, with a half a million views this year - but 70% of those who watch my videos are male. On the traffic to this site, over 45% of the traffic comes direct, less than 35% comes from Google, Twitter sends about 2.5% and the rest are all under 2% - so the diversity of the traffic to this site is nice.

Yearly Recap:

The key themes this year included Google's Panda and Penguin updates but also mentioned the exact-match-domain update, the page layout update and the DMCA updates amongst others. Google and Bing introduced link disavow tools, whereas Google target more and more link schemes this year. SSL and [not provided] was at the top of the charts, but to compensate, Google kept improving webmaster tools. Social was huge this year, with Google on the Google+ side and Bing interfacing with Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Knowledge with the knowledge graph was a major push this year on Google's front as well. Mobile best practices became clear on Google's end but also more clarified on Bing's front. Google Shopping is not a paid Google product, whereas Google Places is now Google+ Local For Business. Yahoo's founder Jerry Yang left and one of Google's first employees, Marissa Mayer became the CEO of Yahoo. In the industry, Jim Boykin started buying up a lot of the search communities and I just feel the industry is more divided than ever before. That is how I would sum up the year in a paragraph or so.

9 Years Covering The Search Industry

Barry Schwartz / Executive Editor

Stats:

Yearly Recap:

Google Penguin:

Google Panda:

Google EMD, Page Layout & DMCA Update:

Google Misc Updates:

Google Monthly Webmaster Reports:

Google SEO/Webmaster:

Google PageRank:

Bing (&Yahoo) SEO/Webmaster:

Google Search:

Mobile:

Google+:

Google Maps:

Google AdWords:

Google AdSense:

Bing adCenter:

Search Business:

Search Industry:

Conferences:

Logos:

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