18th anniversary of the Search Engine Roundtable

For the past 18 years, I have been writing on this site describing what you – the search engine marketers are talking about. Today it is 18. Round table for search engines. I’ve written about search for over 40% of my life – which is strange to think about. And I’ve been doing this consistently every working day for 17 years, several times a day, even during a pandemic. I find it hard to understand that I still find something new to write every day.

18 years of passion:

I started this site 18 years ago to keep notes of what the search marketing community is talking about. A round table of discussions between the brightest minds in search engine marketing, if you will. That passion and mission hasn’t changed – I’m still trying to cover what the search marketing community is about, what is important to the community, and what the community has to say about these changes in our field. It’s less on the forums these days as most of the old online forums have unfortunately slowed down, but social media platforms have taken their place – that doesn’t mean all forums are done – they aren’t. But the community is chatting and discussing and I’m trying my best to find that discussion and highlight it here for all of you.

I still post several stories here every day and so on Search engine country. I still make mine weekly video summarieswhich has improved a lot lately in my opinion (make sure subscribe to the YouTube channel). I continued to do that too Look for vlog where I am trying to pay more attention to new and perhaps old people in our community this has been a challenge during COVID with social distancing, travel issues and the lack of face-to-face meetings. I am now also posting these videos on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts or your favorite podcast player. Don’t forget those funny daily photos and big monthly google webmaster reports. All of this should save you time, inform you about new topics and at the same time make you smile.

A year ago we were about to have a vaccination and hope that life will return to normal. Now we’re not just talking about the third dose, we’re also talking about the fourth dose to protect ourselves. We have two antiviral drugs that are nearing approval to fight COVID, and I hope we can get back to normal around this time next year – but who knows, it’s like trying Google’s algorithm- Predict updates.

If you want, you can read last year’s recap – the 17th anniversary of the Search Engine Roundtable as.

Our Growth (I mean Decline) & Analysis:

While we recorded a 25% growth in traffic in 2019, this year we recorded a 13% decrease in traffic. Search traffic is down over 30%, but our direct traffic is up 22%, email traffic is up 360%, and other channels have increased too. Hence, diversification is important in Google’s own Properties that eat up SEO traffic (and kudos to her, I’m serious).

Mobile and desktop traffic are now roughly balanced, we are at 47% mobile and 51% desktop with the rest of the tablet – which means more desktop traffic than mobile compared to last year.

There are over 32,000 stories on this site now, I’ve written over 29,600 of them – roughly 93% of them. This year alone I’ve posted about 2,000 stories, about a hundred more than last year. We also had around 12,000 approved comments on the stories this year, which is also roughly the same as last year.

With YouTube, my channel – please subscribe has over 2,200 new subscribers (now ~ 12,900 subscribers). I’ve obviously tried to expand this channel. I have over 6.4 million views of this video, with over 54 hours of watch time. Oh, and I made just under $ 1,600 in YouTube ad revenue last year, which is $ 200 more than last year’s revenue. Although you can see I now have video sponsors – thank you sponsors!

Main stories from the last 12 months:

Looking back at 2021, it becomes clear that this was a year with many confirmed Google search algorithms and ranking updates. We had three core updates – June, July and November. We had a number of spam updates; including one Spam update in November, a two-part spam update, a Link spam update and the Predator update. We had other updates like that Page experience update, Update of product reviews for April and Product reviews updated in December, and Title changes. We also had a number of AI / machine learning based algorithms such as MUMMY, Passage ranking, Sub-topic rankings and a couple from Bing like MEB and Speller100.

The indexing got interesting with Index now even google can try the end. Google spent a tremendous amount of time and resources on its help documents and resources, no wonder they are now ranking so well. Search Console has a new design and also Search Console Insights started officially. Google rolled out continuous scrolling and Google My Business for Google Business profiles.

We’ve also had tons of industry moves, IPOs, acquisitions, and organizational changes. And it’s sad too, but we’ve lost some well-respected and beloved members of the industry.

There was a lot I wrote like I said above, but here are what I think are the most important stories from the past 12 months or so (in case I’ve missed any, let me know in the comments):

Search algorithm related:

Crawling and Indexing: SEO: Google Search Console: Bing Webmaster Tools: Search Features: Search Ads: Local Search: Business and Industry: RIP:

Most viewed stories in the past 12 months:

Here are the most viewed stories over the last 12 months of 2021 based on Google Analytics. I should note that my analyzes don’t combine AMP URLs with canonical non-AMP URLs, so this may not be in the exact order of popularity:

We look forward to 2022:

Last year I said it was about IoT, search functions in multimedia and of course BERT and all the other things related to natural language processing. I also said that there will be a lot of health, safety and hopefully vaccines in 2021. But understanding natural language is going to be really impressive – I mean, indexing passages should be fun. Mobile is there and ready, the mobile indexing will be completely converted in a few months. And it was a big year, we announced to MUM, although it wasn’t used much in 2021 – the Search On event showed some possible uses.

I expect a lot of announcements from Google around MUM and more AI / machine learning efforts in search in 2022. You will see more with local search, you will see more with multimedia, and so on.

But the big change for us SEOs, I really think there is going to be a really big overhaul of the quality algorithms. Like Panda and Penguin and Core Updates great, but this one will target a lot of the criticism that Google has received of its search quality over the past year.

Thanks very much:

As I said last year, I really appreciate it and thank you all very much for reading, commenting (or ignoring the comments) and sharing the stories here every day. Stay tuned and let’s build an even better search community in the coming year. Keep everyone safe and sound!

Thanks very much,

Barry Schwartz