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.