An Inside Look At Our Daily SearchCap

Search Engine Land’s Secrets : Mining SearchCap by Andrew Girdwood shows an almost unbelievable statistical breakdown of patterns in our Daily SearchCaps.

Andrew mined the headlines Danny and I included in the SearchCap between the dates of August 1st and October 31st. He then documented which of the 467 sources were cited most often. On average, there are 40.8 citations in the SearchCap. He also notes that if you are cited once, you are more likely to be cited again soon after. There is truth to that last observation. If we find a post we like for the first time, Danny and I are more likely to subscribe to that site for future updates.

Which are the top 20 most cited sources in the SearchCap?

• Search Engine Roundtable with 182 citations (6.5%)
• Search Engine Watch with 105 citations (3.9%)
• Search Engine Journal with 84 citations (3.1%)
• TechCrunch with 83 citations (3.1%)
• SEOmoz with 70 citations (2.6%)
• Search Engine Guide with 62 citations (2.3%)
• News.com with 57 citations (2.1%)
• SEO Book with 54 citations (2.0%)
• ResourceShelf with 53 citations (2.0%)
• Google Blogoscope with 51 citations (1.9%)
• SEO by the Sea with 42 citations (1.6%)
• New York Times with 40 citations (1.5%)
• Google Operating System with 38 citations (1.4%)
• Read/Write Web with 37 citations (1.4%)
• Reuters with 35 citations (1.3%)
• Online Marketing Blog with 32 citations (1.2%)
• Bruce Clay with 30 citations (1.1%)
• Googlified with 30 citations (1.1%)
• adCenter Blog with 27 citations (1.0%)
• Inside AdWords with 26 citations (0.9%)

Yes, I own the Search Engine Roundtable, so I am biased in thinking much there warrants including. I would not write something at the Search Engine Roundtable if I felt it wasn’t significant to note. Still, on average, 2.9 posts from the Search Engine Roundtable make it to the SearchCap each day, which comes out to probably 3% of the articles we write at the Search Engine Roundtable.

What I am very interested to see is the number of sites from this list that actually are cited in Search Engine Land premier articles and not just the SearchCap (IE, articles that we feature as blog posts on SEL itself, rather than as headlines in SearchCap.

Join the discussion on Andrew’s outstanding post at our social networking site, Sphinn.