Pandia presents the articles that were most popular among Pandia’s readers in 2007.

JANUARY TO APRIL 2007

diggers are kids
In the first third of the year our most popular article was How to make use of social media in search engine marketing, one of our many reports from the New York Search Engine Strategies conference. We quoted Neil Patel saying that the people who rule digg are kids. Needless to say, the post reached the front page of digg!

The future of search
We are glad to say that an article series that we put a lot of work became very popular, namely The search engine scene in 2015, a foresight scenario were we used current trends to predict the future of search.
One that did not make it to the top, but that we believe deserves a read was the humorous 5 things you have to search for before you die. We admit it was a bit silly.

MAY TO AUGUST 2007

Google identifies faces in images
Lars Våge told us the story about Google recognizes faces. If you search for a person — let’s say Henrik Larsson — and then add the following text string to the end of the URL: &imgtype=face , Google will only include faces in image search results. Not many search engine oriented sites had discovered that one.

Your own mashup
In Top 5 personalized start pages Pandia presented personalized portals, online services that help you build a home away from home online. Typically, you can add web feeds and bookmarks, get notified of new email, see calendar entries, photos from Flickr, news headlines or your favorite cartoon of the day.

SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER 2007

Top 10 Web Tools
We shared our favorite online tools for blogging, exploring and information management in the article Top 10 Useful Web Tools in October. This was definitely a hit. The sister article, Top 10 Useful Web Sites, also ranked high.

Our November write-up of an article in online, Top 10 sites for researching music, was also read by many.

Search marketing ads we would like to see
Matt Cutts liked our black hat spoof The Dark Side of SEO. Given that his blog is one of the most important in the search engine industry, that lead to new readers.

Our article on how find new books and fellow book lovers online also hit the spot.

MOST POPULAR ARTICLE AMONG FEED SUBSCRIBERS

We implemented Feedburner in May in order to keep track of what our RSS feed subscribers like or don’t like.

So far the most read article among the subcribers is Six great sites for keeping track of search engine news.

ALL YEAR HITS

Rockets and duds
In February Pandia presented a new search engine marketing typology for web pages: Using honey pots and sleepers to get higher search engine rankings. It didn’t make much of an impression at the time, but thanks to Sphinn and Stumbleupon it proved the value of its argument later this year, as it became one of our most popular articles.

We argued, for instance, that articles that only gain relatively few visitors daily over a long period of time may perform better than a page that reaches the front page of digg. High quality content works well in so many ways.

Indeed, many of our most popular articles were posts from 2006 that continued to perform well. Most of them were short guides to web sites, tools and resources. Not only did they gain a lot of inbound links. They were also popular among stumblers and generated a lot of search engine traffic.

The success of Top 5 social bookmarking services and Top 5 alternative search engines proves that top lists may lead to a lot of traffic over time if the content is relevant to your readers.

Our October 2006 article, Ms. Dewey presents a new sexy search engine, continues to deliver a large number of visitors on a daily basis. Why we wonder.

The February 2007 article (an update on an older version) on The size of the World Wide Web apparently ranks well in the search engines. Interestingly enough, this is a topic that is not covered well by other sites.

More in 2008
We promise to come up with more interesting stuff in the year to come! Follow our Search Engine News column, and subscribe to our web feed and our free newsletters!

We wish you a happy new year!

The Pandia Team

See also: Pandia’s most popular articles in 2006
The Most Popular Marketing Pilgrim Stories of 2007
Search Engine Land’s most popular stories