In face of Google search monopoly, what can individuals do?

[cnvi]

The following message was cut out of May 2019 Updates and SERP changes thread at:
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4944194.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:18 am on May 17, 2019 - (PDT -8)



So many asking questions that are completely un-answerable in 2019 because an (illegal) monopoly totally controls web search.

The US DOJ does nothing because we say nothing ... what do you expect? What is stopping you from shouting/saying/speaking up/filing complaints/talking to attorneys/ demanding PUBCON has realistic discussions on this topic?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:39 am (utc) on May 17, 2019]
[edit reason] Cleanup after thread split to new thread [/edit]

[Mark_A]

StoneSolid I understand what you are saying and no I doubt you will be able to get G taken down!

My problem is that all webmasters get something out of G, otherwise they would not continue to support it?

Even though only 3 websites out of 10,000 can hold the top 3 positions in the SERPS, you might expect that the rest of the 10,000 would be anti G but at the moment they aren't, because they get something out of some other keywords and they probably think they have a chance to be top 3 at some point.

[StoneSolid]

All I'm trying to say is that "deny G" solution out of boycott or whatever reason is like gifting your site to others and to google itself.
Additionally, it also shows that google got the freedom to do just about anything. For that matter, they are like piratebay - just put it up, regardless who it belongs to.

@Mark_A
Google was taking the strawberry from the top of the cake almost since day one.

Problem today is, they take the strawberry, sell the better half of the cake and crumble the spoiled part and make you chase the crumbs like a blind pigeon.

[tangor]

Conflating two different issues into a g fault is not accurate. One needs to control their copyright (site content). At present DMCA is the method, wash, rinse, repeat, wash, rinse again and again etc. Scrapers are not g's fault. g is not responsible for your content copyright. Then again...

That may change in the future. The EU has voted on some extreme changes to copyright enforcement so there might be relief in the future. Meanwhile, how freakin' difficult would it be for g to record the original creator? We know why they don't, but that is the real solution (not likely to happen anytime soon).

That said, NOCACHE is the second method to guarding content. g can index and create their snippets, but if you don't allow cache they (theoretically) can't serve it. However, the web has changed, CDNs abound and people are both lazy and demanding. Hence, one's site (if one plays that way) is copied in multiple places.

I get the frustration of many ... but the OP asked:

In face of Google search monopoly, what can individuals do?

Years ago I chose to ignore g and focus on everything else. That has mostly worked out okay. But there is no doubt that g is getting larger and it is getting more difficult to step around the elephant in the room.

[cnvi]

G is the biggest illegal elephant in the room of our lifetime.

[StoneSolid]

Years ago I chose to ignore g and focus on everything else. That has mostly worked out okay. But there is no doubt that g is getting larger and it is getting more difficult to step around the elephant in the room.

Exactly, and I don't know why you needed so much philosophy to openly say it.

While some businesses (and / or websites) can focus on "everything else", there are some that have no choice but to rely on organic search for the most part.

Since we are all in different niches and run different sites, I don't think that advice like "stand outside and pass flyers instead" is useful to anybody.

[Mark_A]

What percentage of your sessions are G organic visitors? For me it is 28%

[MrSavage]

People defend Google by always making the discussion about personal interest and their own websites. It's like those people can't look at the big picture. They can't look at this from an outsiders perspective. How about this? How about caring about something not because it's negative about yourself personally, but seeing something for what it really is? Nope. The apologists can't go there. Why? Well obviously their pockets are filled and continue to be filled. Until it's their problem, then there is no problem. Those same people lack ethics or credibility. Unfortunately there isn't a credibility rating here or anywhere else. You have to decide if the people talking about basking in Google goodness and thus, can't seem to call a spade a spade. Instead, those same people chastise others who want to view this from an NON self-interest perspective. Any half-wit can see Google for what it is. Many people here will suggest finding glory elsewhere or blocking Google. I get the mentality though. History shows that entire counties can stick their heads up their A until things really get out of control. Then when they are finally affected, they start to give a S. On a smaller scale, that's what this community is like. Even if my pockets are being lined by Google it still won't stop me from seeing this for what it is. I certainly wouldn't be chastising people for calling out Google even though I have a steady income stream thanks to Google. It's very hard to find people with honor and integrity. Clearly.

[Shepherd]

Any half-wit can see Google for what it is.

The realists see google for what it is and deal with it. Too many others see google for what "they" want it to be. When reality doesn't match their expectations they turn to places like this thread to create an echo chamber where anyone with a dissenting opinion or inconvenient truth is a troll or half-wit.

[StoneSolid]

When reality doesn't match their expectations they turn to places like this thread to create an echo chamber where anyone with a dissenting opinion or inconvenient truth is a troll or half-wit.

You know, saying "you should try other things as well because google is what it is" isn't exactly an eye opener. We're all doing that already.

Echo chambers are for crying liberals.
I'm personally here to share and gather experiences, even more so because I intend to communicate a summary of it all to my country representatives in EU parliament.

Will it do any good? I doubt it, probable waste of my time.
Will I feel better because of it? Yup, I will.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I intend to communicate a summary of it all to my country representatives in EU parliament.

Any chance of a summary of what you have so far?

There are SERP checkers out there with hundreds of millions of instances of search results that could surely benefit what you're aiming to do.

[Rndm]

While some businesses (and / or websites) can focus on "everything else", there are some that have no choice but to rely on organic search for the most part.

What type businesses rely primarily on organic search? Yes Google organic (and Google in general) has problems but if your business model is based on search engines sending you free traffic this is a business model problem not a Google problem.

[StoneSolid]

Any chance of a summary of what you have so far?

Just a ton of notes, nothing formulated enough for showing as a whole
(but feel free to check my post history on this forum, you'll get a good hint on what it will be about)

What type businesses rely primarily on organic search?

From the top of my head, product reviewers with detailed analysis that keep losing traffic because google omits keywords (details) in long tail searches.

Sidenote - while there isn't a single website in the world that functions on 100% search traffic, (good) search is the only thing that brings the targeted visitors that you specifically aim to please. No banner click or such can come close to your site properly answering the searcher's query.

[Selen]

Problem is, Google provides a set of Rules / Guidelines to follow, but in too many cases following the rules doesn't increase site's rankings. That's where the frustration comes from. It'd be better if there was no guidelines at all. No rules = no expectations of "free traffic."

[tangor]

The traffic one gets is based on what one pays to get it ... ie. the work and content of the site being better than anyone else's.

TANSTAAFL

You pay for it by giving up your content. Only there's no contract, or promise by the other party (g) to even send you any traffic.

Real world has a disturbing way of deflating these fantasy "business relations".

That said, are there problems? You bet! Can webmasters at this stage of the game change things? Probably not. All of this should have been address in 1997-1998 ... never was. Will g be held accountable for squelching ordinary competition? You bet! US Senate is offering a new privacy bill that will gut internet advertising and force REAL CHANGE, just as GDPR is doing in the EU. What the future is like is yet to be determined, but I suspect webmasters will like it even less. :)

I remain, as always, a optimistic pessimist. Why? If things get better I can be pleasantly surprised.

[MrSavage]

I get the sense that some people forget that the internet was supposed to be about exploration. There wasn't supposed to be a roadblock to discovery. If paying to be discovered (via ads) then that's not the internet is it? If you think that version as described is the internet, then wow. Google has simple become the road block to discovery because they want to provide the information that you've assembled on your own property that you spent your own time and resources creating or researching. We must run ads to circumvent Google? The blocker of the internet? What a baffling, yet quickly approaching reality.

[Mark_A]

Take into account the risks of being too invested in one ecosystem.

If a serious decline in G visitors could fold your business, then you are probably too invested in the G ecosystem.

You are in a similar situation if you have a dominant customer, i.e. a customer on whom you rely and whose loss could compromise your business. Better to have 10 small customers rather than 1 large one, from a risk point of view. Traffic provision isn't exactly the same as customers but the comparison is valid, most of your traffic from one source, with no guarantees it will continue = far too much risk.

Simpler idea: all your eggs in one basket! :-)

[cnvi]

@Mark_A, good comment.. please enlighten us into your alternatives to G besides the obvious. TIA.

[MrSavage]

The only mistake we made was thinking that the internet was going to be accessible. I don't think you can blame a webmaster for depending on a clear path to the internet. Google should be commended for doing such a good job that everyone makes it there number one portal. The problem is when they decided to feed the web to you rather than having you venture out onto the web it is essentially a roadblock. Nobody should be faulted for thinking that the internet was going to be open and available to access. I also don't think that anyone should be blamed if they didn't see the day where you had to pay for an ad to get found on the internet. Every webmaster put all their eggs in the internet basket. There is fault in that?

[Shepherd]

Amazon gets less than 30% of their traffic from search (and 50% of that is navigational)
Facebook gets less than 10% of their traffic from search (over 60%, navigational)

To continue to propagate the idea that google is the internet, or even the gateway to the internet, is disingenuous at best.

[MrSavage]

It's built into how many phones and talking boxes? What's the dominance (not their fault for being good) in mobile search? Tipping 99% yet? People soon won't be able to get off the SERPS without clicking some type of kick back to Google. People won't even know it's an ad or a commission payout to Google. LOL if you look at the recent mobile layout roll-out. Great business model for them. Can't knock them for being smart. You can knock others for not stepping up, but I'm sure something will come about. A push-back grows every day and that certainly isn't coming the way of benefactors. Too many big names enjoying the ride. Not that I'm pointing at anyone.

[iamlost]

HTML was originally designed as a simple method to use and share digital documents one already knew about. Findability and search came after the fact as people, as they often do, began to use it other than as conceived. I remember seeing Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web in early 1994 and thinking what a great idea :)

If one looks at the early web it was dominated by curated connections, i.e. directories, webrings, link lists, and a myriad of search 'engines'. Google 'won' in search then eroded Yahoo's directory dominance to become to many who came to the web relatively late synonymous with it; google became a verb as well as a noun.
Note: end 1995: 16 million users; end 2000: 360 million; end 2003, 720 million; end 2005, 1-billion; end 2011, 2.3 billion; end 2014: 3.2 billion; end 2017: 4.2 billion.

And the number of websites has increased similarly.
Note: end 1992: 50 websites; end 1993: 620; end 1995: 100 thousand; 1997: passed 1-million; 2000: passed 10-million; 2003: passed 40 million; 2007: passed 100 million; 2009: passed 200 million; 2012: passed 600 million; 2017: passed 1-billion.

Now for some fun matching (numbers rounded):
* 1995: 16 million users / 100 thousand sites = 160 users per site.
* 2000: 360 million users / 17 million sites = 21 users per site.
* 2005: 1-billion users / 65 million sites = 15 users per site.
* 2010: 2-billion users / 200 million sites = 5-users per site
* 2015: 3.3 billion users / 860 million sites = 4-users per site.
* 2019: 4.3 billion users / 1.6 billion sites = 3-users per site.

If you don't understand the significance of the numbers: competition has grown greater relative to the pie.

And that increased competition is deadly is shown in the following:
The number of websites aka competition grew YoY every year from beginning until 2010 when the number of websites dropped by 13% (32 million), 2013 dropped by 3% (25 million), 2015 dropped by 11% (105 million), 2018 dropped by 8% (135 million).

Without even invoking Google competition for the past decade has been an ever increasing b*tch.

I understand the frustration with Google and their false positives/negatives and wonderfully weird and whacky algos; what I don't understand is the refusal to see beyond Google to both the underlying competitive landscape and the broader options.

Perhaps it's because of having come from the dawn time of the web that I never thought of Google as synonymous with the web nor traffic nor income. Perhaps it's just that others didn't notice the constricting Google straightjacket until it bound them so tight they can't think of anything but it.

That so much of what used to be common was so thoroughly abused by 'SEOs' and ever and again blasted by Google that folks forgot that they still work as originally intended, are still accepted as viable and reasonable by Google - if done/used appropriately and sensibly. It's abuse rather than use that brings the hammer down.

If the overall level of competition has increased so graphically I expect you can expect the level within Google organic search is at least as brutal. Google simply has so many more to choose from in most/all queries every single YoY.
And yes G makes human obvious mistakes - never ever forget that the algos are not human and make a huge absolute number of errors however competent in a relative sense.
And yes, G is attempting to hold and convert their users on their own sites rather than referring them on; behaviour that is over a decade old - understand that it isn't likely to stop.

Google is constantly attempting to build their business; the real elephant in the room question is: what are each one of us doing to build ours? Google is an easy simple default, whether it is also the best growth model for your business is for you to answer. Given that search is ~40% of my sites' traffic with Google at ~55% of that (~22% overall) for several years now is my answer: get out of the Google box. How? That's for you and your business model to discover. Or not.

[tangor]

If you don't understand the significance of the numbers: competition has grown greater relative to the pie.

The last few (at least six) years I have been saying the slice of the pie is getting smaller. :)

Thoughtful brutal post, iamlost!

[cnvi]

From CBSNews.com May 2018...

“Gary Reback: It flatly says that Google's conduct was anti-competitive. It flatly says that Google's conduct hurt consumers. I mean, what else would you need to know to vote out a complaint? There it is, written by your own staff. And yet, nothing happened.

Steve Kroft: They closed the case?

Gary Reback: They closed the case, correct.

The FTC's commissioners decided that Google's conduct could be addressed with voluntary improvements to some of its business practices - and that Google's decision to move its own products to the top of the search page could plausibly be of benefit to consumers. But Reback and others who were directly involved in the investigation have long suspected that the outcome had something to do with Google's political muscle in Washington and its close relationship with the Obama administration. Google spent more money on lobbying last year than any other corporation, employing 25 different firms and helping fund 300 trade associations, think tanks and other groups many of which influence policy.

Gary Reback: They have a seat at the table in every discussion that implicates this issue at all. They know about developments that we never even hear about. So their influence – from my perspective is very, very difficult to challenge. “

[cnvi]

Sound familiar? As the FTC allowed Google to self regulate, so did the FAA allow Boeing to self regulate during the previous executive administration.

[StoneSolid]

The last few (at least six) years I have been saying the slice of the pie is getting smaller. :)

..and the fat cook is eating more and more of the pie, way before slicing it.

THAT is the problem, not the competition.

[NickMNS]

@iamlost I agree with your main thesis, that is competition is a major factor, but I don't think the number of website is relevant to that claim.

The distribution of users to websites is not linear, it is exponential, for simplicity say a Paretto distribution or 80/20, 20% of the website get 80% of the traffic, and it decreases from there. The websites in the tail of distribution, will have no users. Adding more websites simply adds more websites to the tail, lengthening it, all with no users. Case in point I can go a create ten websites right now, in minutes and all ten will have 0 users.

If anything more users, go to fewer sites than before. I have no research to support this claim but I am confident that it is supportable. The only thing that comes close is the statistics in terms of app usage where over the years it has been shown that the bulk of the usage has been only to a dozen or so apps, mainly FB, Twitter, Amazon etc... One must assume that a similar dynamic holds true for websites.

My feeling is that the biggest competitive threat doesn't come from other websites like mine, as very few exist if any. The problem comes from the big players taking an even greater share of the pie. Amazon, collecting data on vendor's product, when a product meets a threshold of profitability it offers same product and pushes the vendors out of view. Google pushing organic results below the fold and obfuscating the maximum legal limit the ad slots.

I can compete in an environment of fair competition where all players play by the same rules, but I feel, as I am sure other do too, powerless in an environment where a the few big players prey on the smaller ones.

[tangor]

I can compete in an environment of fair competition where all players play by the same rules, but I feel, as I am sure other do too, powerless in an environment where a the few big players prey on the smaller ones.

I love apples, and oranges, too ... but I do know the difference.

What field and what makes it level?
Where's the rule book? I want to read that!

[iamlost]

Ten to fifteen years ago the web was noticeably changing: enterprise finally began to pay serious attention to the web, sort of like Walmart coming to town; SM platforms were like a mall drawing traffic away from downtown; and search engines especially Google began to shift from organic referrers to portal/platforms much as Yahoo had already done with directories.

Yes, it wasn't a sudden change even back then, just that that was when many/most webdevs actually began to notice and web fora turned blue and ran with tears. It's been over a decade, now, folks! The very same complaints, concerns, demands, outrage, angst et al. I'm not saying there isn't cause nor that there isn't suffering, I'm saying it does freaking little good. Just as when the malls and Walmarts show up and impact or obliterate small B&M businesses. I lived through that B&M type of disruption in a smallish town as well as this more recent web variation. Yes, this ain't my first rodeo. I succeeded then and I'm succeeding now. As are others. As can you. Maybe.

If you want to mount a crusade: go for it. If you want to contact politicians: by all means. If you want to file legal grievances: feel free. However, if you don't also figure out a way to stay in business between now and when those cows over the rainbow come home you had best build another business model than the one you say isn't working anymore. Reality sucks.

Here's some dating advice with just a modicum (women to site and men to Google... :)) of change :
I could write to the site above that, yes, it’s a quality, classy site and that, yes, it deserves a lot better than that mistaken SERP. I’d add that there are definitely some nice traffic referrers out there, so it should keep on looking. Good luck and Godspeed!

My real advice to that site would be to assess why it keeps on choosing Google. That’s it's big problem. Lots of sites end up with traffic referring backlinks, so clearly not ALL traffic referrers can be scum. But some referrers will always be b*st*rds. So why does it end up with Google? That’s for IT to figure out, not Google.

If you feel your blood pressure rising, and you think that if only "experts" like me placed the proper blame on Google, this would all go away, I respectfully disagree. Google doesn’t read my posts. Only people who are looking for a dose of truth, humor, and insight do.

Yes, I get it: Google is wrong. Google lies about doing no evil. Google strings sites along. No argument here. But there is no power in pointing out the obvious. You know why? Because YOU CAN’T CHANGE GOOGLE!

We can complain to the high heavens about Google and their immoral behavior, and guess what? Tomorrow, Google is going to drop a site it doesn’t care about and then never rank it again. And around and around we go.

So…since you can’t change Google and I can’t change Google, how can we make sure that a) You don’t keep dating Google, and b) You understand that this is the way Google is, no matter how much we wish they weren’t.

[MrSavage]

I realize that written word for everyone is not the best platform for getting a point across.

[Mark_A]

Hi cnvi

@Mark_A, good comment.. please enlighten us into your alternatives to G besides the obvious. TIA.

I am afraid I am just developing my thinking on this, I doubt I have yet gotten past the obvious yet at all, things like bing, social marketing, direct marketing, email marketing, links that bring traffic, press release placement, email newsletters, those sorts of things ..