Search Engine Land Celebrates Its First Birthday!

Happy Birthday to us! Today, Search Engine Land officially turns one year
old. Below, I wanted to share some thanks to all those who’ve helped make it
such a successful year, and I’m going to save the in-depth "what have we
achieved" statistics for sharing for January, when the entire 2007 calendar year
has passed. But I will highlight a few stats now.

There are so many people who have contributed to what we’ve built, and my
apologies to anyone I inadvertently leave out. But among those I wanted to call
out…

Barry Schwartz, our news editor who deserves the title of hardest
working blogger in search. He’s constantly online, constantly looking for the
latest stories to highlight for readers and ensuring we have a rocking
SearchCap daily newsletter
that goes out each day along with our regular blogging coverage.
Chris Sherman, our executive editor who has built up an amazing
number of columns for the site and helped bring in contributing writers, not
to mention being a great writer with fantastic insights on search, who
you’ll be hearing more from now that we’ve finally gotten him some help with
Vanessa Fox having
come on as our features editor.
Greg Sterling, who started out as a correspondent on local and
mobile search engines but has moved up not only as a contributing editor but
as a great all-arounder who, like Chris, writes articles with great insight and
depth.
Our columnists, who have provided some amazing and deep looks at
issues in search and search marketing. I look forward to what they’re going to
share each day and am impressed, grateful, and proud with the quality they
provide. A special call-out to Eric Ward of
our Link Week
column for getting us moving along the idea of the columns idea.
Check out the columns here.
Michelle Robbins, director of technology for our parent company
Third Door Media, who has diligently
worked to ensure that Search Engine Land has withstood being on Digg many
times, plus that we hum along whether it be a site redesign or the addition of
new features.
Chris Elwell and Sean Moriarity of the
Third Door Media team, who
oversee business issues and advertising, ensuring that site is successful
financially.

On a personal note, I wanted to thank my wife and two boys, who’ve seen less
of me this year as I’ve helped raise this new baby of Search Engine Land!

Most of all, I thank our readers who trust us each day to bring them the
latest news in search and search marketing, along with our own original content
and analysis. Thank you for reading!

How about those stats? As I said, I’m going to dive more deep after a full
calendar year has gone by, but here are some quick hits from our first 12 months
after starting from scratch:

19,250 subscribers take our
main news feed as of
yesterday. Want to give us a birthday present? Encourage those you know to
subscribe!
5,037 readers take our
SearchCap newsletter via email. Encouraging others you know to subscribe
is another great gift for us!
2,580 readers take our
Search Month
newsletter.
100% Organic
is our most popular column in terms of email subscriptions, with 527 readers.
Many more read it through visits to the site directly.
Link Week is at
406, and all but one of our
columns has more than 200 email subscribers.
We’ve had just over 3 million visits to the site by just over 2.1 million
unique visitors, producing just under 5 million page views.
Google 2.0: Google
Universal Search has been our most popular article with 126,000 page
views, followed by
Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs at
117,000 page views.
Digg was our top non-search referring site, sending over 565,000 visits,
followed by StumbleUpon at 86,000 visits and Techmeme at 51,000.
Google was our top search referring site, sending nearly 750,000 visits,
followed by Yahoo at 48,000. Top terms? That would be [failure] followed by
[miserable failure].
We’ve gained recognition from everything from the Wall Street Journal to
Ad Age to Techmeme, as you’ll see in our
bragroll.

Finally, some readers might recall that we officially
had launched on
December 11, 2006. So why celebrate today? We actually
started regular
coverage on December 1,
with the site design catching up. In retrospect, I decided our official birthday
should be when we dove in with regular posts — making it December 1.