Search Engine Roundtable's 19th Anniversary

Search Engine Roundtable 19th Anniversary

It has now been 19 years that I’ve been writing on this site, covering what you – the search marketers are talking about from within the search community. Today marks the 19th anniversary of the Search Engine Roundtable. I’ve been writing about search for over 45% of my life – which is insane – it is like almost half of me. More importantly, I’ve been doing it consistently every workday, several times per day, no matter how I feel, for 19 years straight. And as I say every year and think almost every day, it is hard for me to fathom that I still can find several new things to write about every single day on this niche topic of SEO, PPC and search marketing.

19 Years Of Passion:

19 years ago today, 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 between the smartest search marketing minds, if you will. That passion and that mission have 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 fewer stories pointing to the forums these days, as sadly most of the old fashion online forums have slowed down, but social media platforms have picked up in their place and hey, who knows what will happen with Twitter (at least we got Mastodon…). But the community is chatting and discussing and I try my hardest to find that discussion, no matter where it is (public only) 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 continued to do the search vlog where I try to bring more attention to new and maybe old individuals in our community, this has still been a challenge since COVID hit, but things seem to be getting better. I also now publish these videos on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. 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.

It is nice to see some things get back to normal but now that we are in this recession, it is also sad to see friends lose jobs, struggle and deal with financial issues. That being said, we’ve been through this and we will be through more – we are a strong community and we will get through this, as we did the pandemic and previous recessions.

If you want, you can read last year’s recap – the 18th year anniversary of the Search Engine Roundtable as well.

Our Growth & Analytics:

While in 2020 we saw a 13% decline in traffic, this year we saw a 6% increase in traffic from the previous year. Search traffic increased 11% year over year when we saw it decline over 30% last year. Our direct traffic was also up about 6%, last year it was up a whopping up 22%, email traffic was up 65%, and social was pretty level from the previous year.

Mobile traffic share is 43%, which is down from 47% last year – I am not sure why. I guess people in SEO still love to use their desktop browsers. 70% are on Chrome, then 17% on Safari, and the rest are under 4% share each. US traffic is 30%, then India at 12%, and the UK at 7%, so those are the top countries. 65% of the readers are male according to Google Analytics and about 30% are the age of 25 to 34.

There are now about 34,500 stories on this site, I wrote over 31,550 of them – about 92% of them. I posted about 2,000 stories this year alone! We also had about 9,000 approved comments posted this year on the stories, so thank you for all who comment – I do read them all!

With YouTube, my channel – please subscribe has over 2,200 new subscribers (now at ~15,100 subscribers). I’ve been obviously making an effort to grow that channel, but it is going slowly. I have over 6.5 million views on those videos, with over 60,000 hours of watch time. Oh, and I made just under $1,500 in YouTube ad revenue in the past year, which is $100 less than last year’s revenue. Although, if you watch, you will see I have video sponsors now – thank you sponsors!

Most Important Stories In Past 12 Months:

The story this year was told in the incredible number of both confirmed and unconfirmed search ranking algorithm updates. From the May 2022 and September 2022 broad core updates, to the product reviews updates, page experience update, spam updates and then the new helpful content update – Google is working like crazy to show more relevant and useful content in its search results. We had other updates, all of them are listed below, it might be too much to even scan through. We had a ton of local search updates too. At least we learned that Panda evolved into Coati before it was assimilated into the core updates.

Google replaced Google Webmaster Guidelines with Search Essentials, pushed out an updated search quality raters guidelines, spoke a ton about E-A-T, released some spam updates/guidelines and much more. Search Console and Merchant Center had tons of upgrades this year as well.

Google rolled out tons and tons of features, a lot focused on products and shopping and visual search. We also got the new ad label and new favicons and sitenames in the search results.

Google had far fewer crawling and indexing issues this year than last, so that is a good thing. Google Ads on the other had seemed to have way more lag and issues this year than previous. FLoC to no one’s surprise turned out to be a flop. And Google launched a more acceptable Google Partners program.

Bing continued to push IndexNow and at the same time, pushed the new BingBot.

Oh and of course, the Google Analytics 4 news.

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):

Google Broad Core Updates:
Google September 2022 Broad Core Update Is Live – What We Are Seeing Now
Google September Core & Product Reviews Updates Both Finished Rolling Out On September 26th
Google May 2022 Broad Core Update Is Live – What We Are Seeing Now
The SEO Impact Of The Google May 2022 Broad Core Update
Google May 2022 Core Update Done Rolling Out On Day 15
Google May 2022 Core Update – Big Tremors After It Was Complete?

Google Spam Updates:
Now Seeing Volatility For The Google Product Reviews Update (v. March 2022)
For Google Updates, The Product Reviews Update III Is Not That Huge – So Far
Google October 2022 Spam Update Rolling Out – 11 Months After Last Spam Update
Google October 2022 Spam Update Completed In ~42 Hours

Google Page Experience Updates:
Google Page Experience Update For Desktop Rolling Out
Google Page Experience Update For Desktop Done Rolling Out

Misc Google Search Algorithm Related:
Google Featured Snippet Callouts, False Premises, MUM & More
Google Title Link Algorithm Update For Multi-Language Or Transliterated Titles
Google Deduplication Of Top Stories From Web Search Results
Google Coati Algorithm – The Google Update You Never Heard Of
Old Google Page Speed Algorithms Are No Longer Used
Google Documents Search Ranking Updates As Systems; Labels Live Or Archived Notable Algorithms
Google SafeSearch Filter Can Now Update Faster

Crawling & Indexing:
Google Search Is Very Broken Now: Outages, Indexing Issues, Pages Missing & More
Google Search Indexing Issue On July 15th – Google Not Indexing New Content
Google Seems To Be Not Indexing Or Serving New Content This Morning (Update Confirmed)
Google: We Do Not Crawl & Index Niche Shorter Content More Or Better

SEO:
Goodbye Google Webmaster Guidelines, Hello Google Search Essentials
Google Updates Search Quality Raters Guidelines On July 28th
Google: E-A-T Applies To Every Single Query
Google: Links Will Be Less Important As A Ranking Factor In The Future
Google: Links Have A Lot Less Significant Impact For Ranking Today
New Google Robots Tag indexifembedded: Control Indexing With Embedded Content
Google’s Danielle Marshak On How Google Understands Videos
Google Now Supports Education Q&A Structured Data
New Google Search Learning Video Rich Results
Google Suspends Job Training Rich Results
Google Now Supports Pros and Cons Structured Data For Reviews Pages
Google Adds Examples Of Types Of Product Review Pages To Help Doc
More From Google On AI Content – It’s About If The Content Is Helpful
Google: We Have Algorithms To Detect & Demote AI Altered Plagiarized Content
Updates To Google HTTP Status Codes, Googlebot & Job Posting Help Docs
Video: 8 Tips On E-Commerce SEO From Google

Spam:
Google’s 2021 Web Spam Report: Hello Google SpamBrain
Google: We Reduced Irrelevant Search Results By 50% & Made 5,000 Changes In 2021
Google Penalizing News Publishers With Manual Actions For Discover & Google News
Google Now Says Automatically Generated Content Against Guidelines When Intended To Manipulate Search Rankings
Google’s New Spam Policy: Policy Circumvention
New: Google Rich Results Not Allowed On Prohibited, Regulated Or Harmful Products
Google Local Spam Now Includes Duplicate Photos, Posts, Videos, and Logos
Google Review Guidelines Updated To Disallow Discouraging Negative Or Selectively Solicit Positive Reviews
Google Review Guidelines Now Prohibit Incentivizing Removal Of Negative Reviews
New Google Business Guidelines For Virtual Food Brands & Delivery-Only Businesses

Bing:
IndexNow Now Sharing URLs Between Search Engines & IndexNow API
Old BingBot User-Agent To Stop Being Used In Fall 2022
Microsoft: Half Of Bing Crawls Are New BingBot User Agent
Bing News PubHub Moved To Bing Webmaster Tools

Search Features:
Google Search Officially Rolls Out New Site Name & Favicon Design
All The Google Announcements From Search On 2022
All The Search Related Announcements From Google I/O 2022
Google Rolls Out Multisearch, Lens, AR, Maps & Other Expanded Search Features
Google Search Results Rolls Out Much More Visual Design In Grid Formats & More
Google Search Adds New Ways To Find Deals While Shopping
Google Testing Explore More Visual Products Section
Google Adds Pros & Cons To Search Result Snippets
You Can Now Remove Personally Identifiable Information (PII) From Google Search
Search By Image & Text With Google Multisearch
Google News Launches New Design
Finally: Google Adds Lens Button To Desktop Homepage Search Bar
Bing Tests AI Chat Feature At Top Of Search Results

Search Ads:
Official: Google Ads Rolls Out Sponsored Label
Google Drops FLoC For Topics API With 300+ Topics
Google Ads News From Google Marketing Live – There Is A Lot…
New To Google Ads Performance Max: Customer Acquisition Goals, New Insights & Upgrade Tool
Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns Gains Several New Features
Google Ads Similar Audiences Segments Going Away Next Year
Google Ads API Version 12.0 Now Available
Google Ads API Version 11.1 Now Available
Google Ads API Version 11 Now Available
Google Ads API Version 10.1 Now Released
Google Ads API Version 10 Now Available
Google AdWords API Shutting Down Tomorrow, April 27th
Google Ads Editor v2.2 Adds Asset Library Access, Easier Ad Scheduling, Improved Notifications & More
Google Ad Editor Version 2.1 With Overview Page Design
New Google Ads Editor v2.0 Live With Performance Max Campaign Support & More
Google Ads Scripts Gains Support For Performance Max Campaigns
Google My Ad Center Rolling Out To All
New Streamlined Google Ads Tools & Google Ad Extensions Now Assets
Microsoft Advertising Updates Reporting Capabilities & Usability
New Google Partners Directory Now Live

Local Search:
Google Local Search Update On March 23rd ‘Corrects’ Vicinity Update
Google Local Search Ranking Bug Fix Rolling Out
Google Local Search Ranking Update Around September 7th
Confirmed: Google November 2021 Google Local Search Update
Google Local Search Ranking Algorithm Update Last Week
Google Maps 2021 Blocked 100 Million Fraudulent & Abusive Edits & More
Google Business Profile Manager Is Going Away Early 2022
Google Deprecating The Google My Business API On April 20, 2022
New Google Business Profile Web Search Menu Now Rolling Out
Google Business Profile Manager Redirecting To Google Search
Google Business Profile Photo Insights Will Go Away
Google Business Profiles Messaging FAQs For Automated Responses To Customers
Google My Business App No Longer Available
Google Sues Company That Impersonates Google Through Scammy Telemarketing Calls

Google Analytics:
Reaction Towards Google Killing Google Analytics 3 For Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics Makes Privacy Changes To Google Ads Search Queries Report
Google Analytics 4 Now Supports UTM Term, UTM Content, Conversion & Bounce Rate Metrics
Google Analytics 4 Adds New Reporting & Features
Google Data Studio Is Now Looker Studio
Google Tag – A New Version

RIP:
The Industry Mourns The Loss Of Bill Slawski: The SEO Mentor To The Community

Most Viewed Stories In Past 12 Months:

Here are the most viewed stories in the past 12 months of 2022 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:

New Google Helpful Content Update To Change SEO Much Like Panda Did
Google May 2022 Broad Core Update Is Live – What We Are Seeing Now
Google September 2022 Broad Core Update Is Live – What We Are Seeing Now
Google Search Is Very Broken Now: Outages, Indexing Issues, Pages Missing & More
Spring 2022 Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update
The SEO Impact Of The Google May 2022 Broad Core Update
Google Helpful Content Update Is Now Rolling Out
Larger Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On April 20th & 21st
Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On October 22, A Day After The Spam Update Finished.
Google Offering SEO Certification Taught By Googlers As Part Of Digital Marketing Course
Rumor: Apple To Announce New Search Engine Next Week

Looking Forward To 2023:

Last year I said it I would expect a ton 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 that. So I was kind of wrong but Google did tout a ton of AI things this past year, just that MUM didn’t go as wide as I thought (at least Google didn’t communicate that). I also said Google would do “a big revamp in quality algorithms.” I think that is dead on with the updates listed above between the core updates, product reviews update, spam updates and the new helpful content update.

In 2023, I think we will see a lot more for the helpful content update, in a very big way. The core updates, I think, may be lighter and less impactful. I do think we will see stronger spam updates in 2023 as well.

I hope MUM will expand more and be used more in more places in web search. I do think AI will become used more in SEO, for better or worse. And I do think we will continue to see a trend in more visual search interfaces, because of the TikTok effect.

And of course, on the ad side, more AI, more automation and Performance Max really taking over more than it has already (but everyone knows that).

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

UrbanObserver

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