Today marks the 17th anniversary of starting this site, the Search Engine Roundtable. I’ve been writing about search for over 40% of my life – which is weird to think about. And I’ve been doing it consistently every workday, several times per day, even through a pandemic, for 17 years. It is hard for me to fathom that.
17 Years Of Passion:
17 years ago, I started this site as a way to kind of keep notes on what the search marketing community was talking about. A roundtable of discussions, if you will. That passion and that mission has not changed – I still try to cover what the search marketing community is buzzing about, what the community cares about and what the community is saying about those changes in our space. It is less in the forums these days, as sadly most of the old fashion online forums have slowed down, but more so via social media channels – a new form of forum discussion. But the community is chatting and discussing and I try my hardest to find that discussion and highlight it here for you all.
I still continue to publish several stories here a day and on Search Engine Land. I still produce my weekly video recaps, which I think has been improving a lot lately (make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel). I also started that new search vlog a bit over a year ago where I interview various search personalities in person (harder now with COVID) to bring more attention to new and maybe old individuals in our community. Don’t forget about the fun daily photos and big monthly Google webmaster reports. These are all aimed to save you time, while catching you up on new topics and making you smile at the same time.
COVID has made some of these things a challenge and the truth is, a lot of what I wrote about after March was COVID related. Many new local features, many new search features, many new search ad features around COVID. I really hope and pray we all get through this and can return to normalcy in early 2021.
You can read last year’s recap – the sweet 16 of the Search Engine Roundtable as well.
Our Growth (I Mean Decline) & Analytics:
As you may remember, we got hit by that May core update and it took a toll on our traffic here. While last year we saw 25% growth in traffic, this year we saw a 18% decline in traffic. Search traffic declined over 20% and other channels suffered as well. The positive news on that front is that our DuckDuckGo traffic is up over 25%.
Mobile and desktop traffic are now about even, we are at 49% mobile and 49% desktop with the rest tablet – so that is a first where mobile is now even with desktop.
There are now over 30,000 stories on this site, I wrote close to 28,000 of them – 94% of them. I posted just about 1,900 stories this year alone, which is about the same as last year. We also had about 12,000 comments posted this year on the stories, which is about the same as last year as well.
With YouTube, my channel – please subscribe has over 2,200 new subscribers (now at 10,670 subscribers). I’ve been obviously making an effort to grow that channel. I have over 6.3 million views on those videos, with over 47,000 hours of watch time. Oh, and I made just under $1,400 in YouTube ad revenue in the past year, which is $400 more than last year’s revenue. Cha ching!
Most Important Stories In Past 12 Months:
Looking back at 2020, clearly COVID was the biggest impact on our industry for many reasons. It had both negative and positive impacts on many businesses, depending on the industries you focus on. It lead to new features in organic search, paid search, local search and so many areas of search.
We only had two core updates this year, one in January and one in May but to our surprise – we have not had another core update since but we had tons of unconfirmed Google algorithm updates.
BERT is now in 100% of queries, the mobile-first indexing deadline was pushed to March 2021, the page experience update was announced and will be live in May 2021, we await passage indexing (which is about rankings) and we had tons and tons of indexing issues in 2020.
There was a lot that I wrote, like I said above, but here is what I think are the most important stories over the past 12- months or so (if I missed any, let me know in the comments):
Search Algorithm Related:
Google May 2020 Core Update Is Live – What We See So Far
Google May 2020 Core Update 100% Rolled Out
Google January 2020 Core Update Is Live & It’s Big
SEOs Share Impact Of The Google January 2020 Core Update
Google Search Announcements: BERT, Passages & Subtopic Indexing & More
Google Passage Ranking, It Is Not Passage Indexing
Google News Submission Not Required, Powered By BERT & New Top Stories Features
DeepRank Is Google’s Codename For BERT
Google Page Experience Update – Google’s Next Algorithm Update Coming Next Year
Google Page Experience Update To Launch May 2021 With New Snippet Labels
Google Confirmed The November 2019 Google Local Update – Here Is What We Know
Bing AI Autosuggest, People Also Ask, Intelligent Answers & More AI Improvements
Crawling & Indexing:
Google Deadline For Mobile-First Indexing Now March 2021, Not September 2020
Google Shares Details On The Canonicalization & Mobile-Indexing Bugs
We Were Right: Google Had Indexing Bugs With Canonicalization & Mobile-Indexing
Google Again Had An Indexing Issue With News Content Last Night
Google: The Search Indexing Issues Are Now Resolved
Yesterday’s Google Indexing Issue Seems Resolved
Google: GoogleBot User Agent New Name Is Fully Live
The New GoogleBot Dynamic User Agent Names Are Live
GoogleBot Now Can Crawl Over HTTP/2
BingBot Gets New Evergreen User Agents
SEO:
Google Updates Search Quality Raters Guidelines On October 14th
Google Updates Search Quality Raters Guidelines On December 5th
Bing Webmaster Guidelines Are Updated; A Must Read
Google Updates The How Google Search Works Doc
Google Nofollow Change March 1st But Google Says Don’t Expect Any Change Yet
Bing On How It Ranks Web Pages & Content
Web Stories Now On Google Discover
Bing Adds Snippet Controls Tags; Like Google
Google Search Console:
Google Search Console Insights Is Live For Some
Google Search Console Improves Data Exports In A Big Way
Google Search Console Crawl Stats Report Is Now Outstanding
Core Web Vitals Replaced Speed Report In Google Search Console
Google Disavow Tool Finally Migrated To New Search Console
Google Search Console Performance Reports News Filter
Google Structured Data Testing Tool Going Away; SEOs Are Not Happy
Bing Webmaster Tools:
New Bing Webmaster Tools Live With New URL Inspection Tool
Bing Site Explorer: Old But New
Official: Bing Launches New Robots.txt Tester Tool
Bing Webmaster Tools Link Tool Lets You Compare Link Profiles
New: Site Scan In Bing Webmaster Tools
Search Features:
Google Shopping Is Free – Froogle Is Back, For Real This Time
Google Shopping Free On Google.com, Not Just Google Shopping Tab
Google Shopping Goes Free Worldwide In Mid-October
Bing Shopping Now Allows Free Listings In The Footer
Google Featured Snippets Now Highlight Answers On Your Website
Everything You Need To Know About The Google Featured Snippet Deduplication Change
Google’s Right Hand Side Featured Snippets Are Being Removed But Not Moved To Center
Google Stops Displaying Almost All Top Right Featured Snippets
Bing Yes Or No Questions & Expands Intelligent Answers Globally
Google Question Hub’s “What Is Your Question” Is Wider Than COVID-19 Searches
After Testing; Google Launches Search Tips For Queries That Do Not Return Great Matches
Search Ads:
Google Ads Search Terms Report To Hide Some Searches
The New Microsoft Advertising Is Rolling Out To All
Google Ads Recommends You Switch To Broad Match With Smart Bidding
SEMs Not Happy With New Google Partner Program Requirements
Google Postpones New Partners Program Requirements To 2021
Local Search:
Google My Business Upgraded Profiles; $50 Per Month
Google My Business New Performance Metrics
Google My Business Adds Health & Safety Attributes
Business:
DOJ Sues Google Over Monopolistic Actions In Search & Search Advertising
Larry Page & Sergey Brin Hand Sundar Pichai CEO Role For Both Alphabet & Google
Will Apple Search Take Market Share Away From Google?
Bing Now Microsoft Bing With Curved Logo
Google Webmaster Central Now Known As Google Search Central
Amazing Google Movie On How Search Works
Most Viewed Stories In Past 12 Months:
Here are the most viewed stories in the past 12 months of 2020 based on Google Analytics. I should note that my analytics does not combine AMP URLs with the canonical non AMP URL, so this might not be in exact order of popularity:
Google Doodle: Thank You Coronavirus Helpers, Apr 6, 2020
Big Google Search Update Rolling Out Now – August 10th, Aug 10, 2020
Google January 2020 Core Update Is Live & It’s Big, Jan 14, 2020
Big Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update – Currently Unconfirmed, Feb 9, 2020
Google May 2020 Core Update Is Live – What We See So Far, May 5, 2020
August 15th – Another Possible Big Google Search Algorithm & Ranking Update, Aug 15, 2020
Sites Impacted By The Google May 2020 Core Update In A Big Way, May 6, 2020
A Big Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update Happening Now?, Jun 23, 2020
Google January 7th Search Ranking Algorithm Update Early Signals, Jan 7, 2020
Early Signs Of A Google Search Algorithm Ranking Update On September 23rd, Sep 23, 2020
Large Spike Google My Business Suspensions, Nov 23, 2020
Looking Forward To 2020:
Last year I said it was about voice search integration and IoT, multimedia in search and how search engines improve with understanding natural language queries. I think on all parts, those areas really exploded in 2020 with so much going on with IoT, crazy cool features in multimedia search and of course BERT and all the other things around natural language processing. I obviously did not predict the pandemic – sorry about that.
2021 will obviously be a lot about health, safety and I hope vaccines. But natural language understanding will really be impressive – I mean, passage indexing should be fun. Mobile is here and done with mobile indexing being fully switched over in a few months.
But what is the thing I am missing in 2021? I think local is going to be way bigger than it is now.
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 let’s get through 2020 and have an amazing 2021!
Thank you,
Barry Schwartz
