№ 04 · Pioneers & Legendary Authors

Barry Schwartz

Founder, Search Engine Roundtable & RustyBrick

If an update happened, he wrote it up before lunch.

There is a reason Search Engine Roundtable is the first tab open on so many SEO monitors every morning. Barry Schwartz has been documenting Google's behaviour — announced and unannounced — at a pace nobody else in the industry sustains. Alongside that, he runs RustyBrick, a New York web and mobile development shop.

Dossier

Role
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable & RustyBrick
Known for
The industry's daily news record
Active since
2003
Based
New York, United States
Organisation
RustyBrick
Disciplines
Search NewsAlgorithm TrackingWeb Development
Notable work
Search Engine RoundtableSearch Engine LandRustyBrick

A working archive of Google

Schwartz's real contribution is cumulative. Any individual post about a ranking fluctuation is minor; twenty years of them, timestamped and cross-referenced against forum chatter and Google statements, forms the only continuous public record of how the search engine actually changed.

When practitioners argue about when a behaviour started, the Roundtable archive usually settles it.

Search Engine Land

He has also written the daily search recap for Search Engine Land for years, giving his reporting a second distribution channel with a broader marketing audience.

RustyBrick

The development agency builds custom web applications, e-commerce systems, mobile apps and a well-known set of Jewish religious-practice apps. Keeping a delivery business running alongside the journalism is part of why his commentary stays grounded in what teams can actually implement.