Well loyal readers, as the Search Engine Strategies conference looms right around the corner and I’m all geared up with my press pass, laptop, camera and notebook for making my rounds and surprise visits to different seminars, workshops, booths, bars, and search engine reps, Pandia emailed me today to let me know that I’ve won their best weblog award on search engine marketing 2004. Woohoo, finally, some recognition!
February has been a hectic month for the Search Engine Journal and as some of our readers may know already we have not been as on top of as many scoops as we have been in the past. Because of the amount of traffic we’ve been receiving and by using WordPress database powered PHP to publish our news, we found out that our host’s server could no longer sustain our bandwidth needs.
We decided to leave our respected host and have now propagated over to A Small Orange, a really great and affordable hosting service which has had no problems or downtime to date. As much as we like our new host thus far, the transfer did get our stories out of Google News, which is supposed to be reindexing our site within one week. Hopefully, they’ll pick us back up again. Google News has been responsive so far with emails and timelines, but the dependency on a web crawler as opposed to RSS (which MSN and Yahoo News use) to find and index new stories seems to have its limitations at times.
Today’s award which mentions this blog in the same company as Gary Price, Danny Sullivan and Andy Beal has really got me motivated to making 2005 a dream year for this blog. Pandia awarded us despite calling the blog “sobering” – here’s the snippet:
Search Engine Journal is a very sober weblog, making it a little bit less informal and less personal than some blogs.
The entries also tend to be a little bit longer, making it look more like a news column than a “proper” blog.
However, this is probably one of its strengths. It brings you all the essential news, as well as more extensive analysis, reviews and “how to” guides.
Search Engine Journal gets the Pandia Award 2004 for best search engine marketing weblog for bringing the facts in a transparent way.
Thank you Pandia. The vision behind Search Engine Journal is to make it a news journal of search engine, Internet, and marketing related happenings, news, stories, fun, and interviews. I do not try to keep a sober workshop here, but do really like the quote about us bringing more than news to the table, and more than blogging, we’ve always considered ourselves as a hybrid of both. Hence the name – “Search Engine Journal.”
The word journal has many meanings, but the two most relevant to this publication are those of *personal journal, or web journal (blog)* and *daily newspaper*. Thank you Pandia, thank you readers, thanks to the many writers including Jim Hedger, Barry Swartz and Sushubh Mittal who lend us their thoughts on an ongoing basis, and thanks Andy for linking to us from your coverage of this story!
