Approaching Google SEO as a Zero Sum Game

[goodroi]

We battle for the best representation on Google serps all the time. There is only so much traffic and we all want as much as we can get. When we lose our #1 ranking, we lose traffic and that traffic goes somewhere. It often flows to the new site that took over our #1 spot, which is why many people view the Google serps like a zero sum game.

Let's share how & why we approach Google SEO as zero sum game or why you think it is smarter to take a different view.

[Shaddows]

Ok, so next time someone reports they lost all their traffic, we should all agree that they are now on a Google property?

Google must have a lot of small-scale manufacturing operations that have gone hitherto undiscoved.

Really? says who? Sounds a bit presumptuous to me

Says me, because we're talking about where traffic goes after algo changes, and your talking about advertising revenue- which does not absorb traffic, merely charges for referring it to a paying customer.

And [print empires were] such a good thing that it must be allowed to happen again in a modern incarnation?

Investigative journalism is generally held to be a good thing, especially when the current "news" environment is the alternative. If you don't fund journalism, you get all the quality that comes from people who work for free. Or generate traffic through clickbait. Print empires could only command vast revenues because people valued the publication enough to give it wide circulation.

But anyway, my point was not whether print advertising is inherently good or bad, rather that is was a successful way of raising revenue invented decades and possibly centuries before Google existed. Blaming advertising for ruining your business is an option, I suppose, but not one I would (possibly presumptuously) advocate.

G algo changes have a purpose, far and beyond improving user experience, thus the expected EU fines and litigation from large publishers.

I say again, approaching 100% of lost traffic resulting from an algo change is retained in SERPs. Google simply does not have a broad range of products to promote- and those they have generally fail. If they are operating a vast conspiracy, they are crap at it.

Layout changes generally favour advertising, which helps ecoms who buy advertising. I do not have a problem with this. YMMV.

Legitimate business is one thing, abuse is another.

Quite. Let anti-trust laws take care of abuse. Join a suit. Or start one. But, at risk of repeating myself, the "I lost 90% of my traffic" reports does generally means a non-Google 3rd party picked up that traffic, making an anti-trust suit a non-starter.

Objecting to Google's massive profits while they remorselessly pull opaque levers that sends your business down the pan is perfectly reasonable. Accusing them of stealing traffic, when those profits demonstrably derive from selling advertising in not reasonable.

[Edit for grammar]

[heisje]

I lost 90% of my traffic . . . . I say again, approaching 100% of lost traffic resulting from an algo change

I don't recollect any such extreme complaints here, re: massive traffic loss, most people complain of traffic loss in the region of 20 - 30%. -- while still substantial, 90% is a totally different story.

Pushing good relevant sites down in serps, and allowing *less relevant* ones (**not useless ones**) to float:
1.- Makes ads more relevant, increasing ad clicks
2.- Forces hurt sites to increase ad spending
3.- While really not killing G's usefulness, which would eventually kill (1) and (2)

This way, while part of lost traffic moves from A to B, a great lot moves from A to C, through paid ads and other properties, and interestingly A has to pay for the demotion privilege by buying more ads from C, to compensate for the loss. Also, the more bids for ads, the higher the price! >>>> SUCCESS !

Not nuclear science, is it? And nothing "zero sum".

.

[edited by: heisje at 6:47 pm (utc) on Mar 22, 2017]

[NickMNS]

Pushing good relevant sites down in serps, and allowing *less relevant* ones (**not useless ones**) to float:
1.- Makes ads more relevant, increasing ad clicks
2.- Forces hurt sites to increase ad spending
3.- While really not killing G's usefulness, which would also kill (1) and (2)

Not nuclear science, is it? And nothing "zero sum".

What you describe is exactly a zero sum game. You just left out half the equation.

Before the update the "less relevant" site was pushed down in the ranking, so to get more traffic this site was buying ads, whereas the "more relevant" site was not buying ads. Then the algo update happens, the "more relevant" site is pushed down and now starts buying ads, whereas the "less relevant" site is pushed up and no longer needs to pay for ads. Net gain to Google = Zero.

Sure you can argue that the "less relevant" site will continue buying ads, but then you can just easily argue that the "more relevant" site will not start buying so again zero.

[heisje]

Net gain to Google = Zero.

Not so. Main benefit to G comes from floating up the serps less-relevant sites, making ads more attractive to users than otherwise. This is a positive flow to Google, as Ads are paid mainly by sites that have little or no chance at organic results, for a number of reasons.

Difference of Ad payment between A and B is a secondary benefit to Google. Why is A (relevant) destined to pay more in Ads than B (less relevant)? A is relevant as *part of being a better site*, is generally more useful to users, is mostly able to generate more income, better profit, may thus command a higher advertising budget, and may make better use of it. B is weaker overall, commands smaller advertising budget, if any. So, preferred place for A would be down bellow, as it disrupts flow to Ads by its overall goodness when high, while it has no great incentive to pay for Ads of its own, despite it can afford it. B acts as a passable poor relative placeholder.

.

[NickMNS]

I think you are making some big assertions, about profitability and income. Yes this may be true for some sites just as it may false for others. You can not know which it is and neither can Google. It may be possible (in an extreme case) to know this for a few niches, but it would be impossible to know this for all site across all niches and keywords. Thus making it impossible for Google to optimize for. Not to mention that profitability and income are impacted by a wide range of factors outside the realm of the web and of Google's control. So you may by luck land on an optimal degree of site relevance today and get the desired outcome, but this would certainly change again tomorrow. And lets assume that this (firm level income and profitability) would be knowable by Google, then they would be much better off exploiting this information directly in the stock market, instead of wasting time and resources extracting money out advertisers.

[heisje]

Very true! that's why not everyone under the sun has been thus affected. Still, if recent forum noise (and personal experience with multiple sites) is anything to go by, a very large percentage of sites has been affected recently in the manner I have described.

Live Long And Prosper

.

[MrSavage]

There are stacks upon stacks of ads and Google monetization on some searches that previous were never so commercialized. If my site once ranked? I fells it's like D-Day of the internet. The beach landing. That organic traffic clientele get to the beach (Google) but there is more and more and more difficulty to get off the beach onto solid ground. Most of those soldiers were taken out on the sand. Like potential traffic, slowly but surely those people are being swept up in ads or other commercialization links. Those potential organic clicking people are getting picked off before they can even get to where I'm at. The beaches are enforced and are getting more reinforcements daily from what I see. If you get off the beach, I have a site for you!

The only people defending or denying the obvious are one of the lucky ones. I think most everyone has decided that organic traffic is not an investable proposition. Nobody would tell a friend today to launch a web business that will depend or live off Google organic traffic. Organic is not going to other people doing what I'm doing. Some, maybe. Most? It's just getting picked off by the stacks upon stacks of commercialized link options that exist above where my site actually exists on the (LOL) organic results. Mobile is king and that is so ad laden these days, it's almost beyond comprehension. Do most people use Google or are we too busy combing data rather than seeing what the truth is. Book smart? Glad that's not me.

[heisje]

Like potential traffic, slowly but surely those people are being swept up in ads or other commercialization links. Those potential organic clicking people are getting picked off before they can even get to where I'm

are we too busy combing data rather than seeing what the truth is

Excellent depiction of reality! Puzzles me whatever stops people seeing elementary facts.

Zero sum between A and B while ignoring C, the elephant in the room? What a fallacy!

Every single algo modification works towards this objective, gradually edging users to Ads & monetization links, more pronounced in e-commerce searches, striving meantime to keep a delicate balance i.e. preserving Google's viability as a search engine. Part of it works by allowing lower quality sites to thrive, making highly relevant Ads truly attractive and a sensible choice, siphoning traffic. All these PhD's at G are not paid for nothing . . . .

The high floating lower-quality/relevancy sites (the B's) don't get the amount of traffic the A's would get if at the same position. This increment, getting larger by the day, goes to C (Google links and Ads). A and B organics don't make zero sum, due to this huge leak to C (Google).

Clearly, it would be a great fallacy to count Ad paying sites in "zero sum" of *organic* results!

.

[heisje]

@Shaddows

Says me, because we're talking about where traffic goes after algo changes, and your talking about advertising revenue- which does not absorb traffic, merely charges for referring it to a paying customer.

Counting Ad paying sites in "zero sum" of *organic* results? Smart!

.

[Shaddows]

Ok, I can accept that we are at cross purposes.

I have been consistently talking about SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) . If you are only talking about Organic, then we have to have a more nuanced discussion.

First up, I disagree that Google produces a deliberately sub-optimal product to push people to ads. For a start, it is inefficient. Users would need to be educated that ads are better, which would be a difficult message to convey. It would be much more beneficial to maximise traffic through a great product, then monetise through ads. Just like non-Google info sites, really. There would be no point in any given site to have crap content just so people click the links!

Layout updates are not that frequent. They are not zero-sum with regards organic, but they are also totally irrelevant to your SEO strategy, which is (in this narrower discussion) about maximising your Organic presence.

So in that scenario, your SEO efforts should surely assume zero-sum (since you cannot affect layout), while your grievances can legitimately be focussed on Google's monetisation strategy.

In any case, it is either actually zero sum, if you include advertising as a legitimate traffic acquisition channel, or should be assumed zero-sum to maximise your competitiveness to other organic actors. All this only applies to your SEO efforts, not your views on Google, it's power, influence or profit levels.

I have a view on the rest too. But that is not the point of the thread. This is not presumptuousness, it is forum rules.

[glakes]

Zero sum between A and B while ignoring C, the elephant in the room? What a fallacy!

"C" must stand for charity right? I mean certainly the fact that Google (Alphabet) is a publicly owned for profit multi-national corporation has no bearing on how or why they would arrange their most profitable product (search) to impact profitability. Yeah, right... Even the MFA site owners on this forum analyze traffic patterns and make adjustments to their sites to increase clicks on ads and more time on site. Is anyone here really such a fool to believe Google does not do the same?

Just when I thought I had seen it all it got worse. For example, we spent many thousands of hours and dollars solving/preventing a common problem. We were doing great in Google and had the reasonably priced products to prevent/solve the problem. Then two sentence forum posts about this problem started appearing on page 1 of the serps, from five years earlier, which eventually overtook us. Then came some blog posts about people complaining about the problem but offered no real solution, which further diluted the search results and more traffic was siphoned away. Amazon was always present in the top of the search results, though their listings pointed to product pages that did not solve the problem and were only loosely related to the issue. When old forum posts, thin blog posts and an Amazon listing are not enough to dummy down the search results and push us down, Google gives Amazon an extra boost with domain crowding by listing more irrelevant pages. Meanwhile our page that described and solved the problem, with a product, languished in the search results. Finally in 2015 our ranks returned for that page, but the traffic Google was sending was non-buyer junk (aka zombies). After many months of pulling our hair out, we finally pulled our heads out of the sand, dumped Adwords, and invested heavily in different marketplaces. Today we are doing just fine.

Google SEO is not a zero sum game by any means. When the money flows to the house, they will arrange the deck in such a way that there is no opportunity to win or at a very minimum offer only limited success to keep one playing the game (aka milking webmasters). Maybe five or ten years ago Google was a zero sum game, but things have changed and in many ways Google has put up numerous roadblocks to prevent users from visiting websites with great information or great products by dummying down the search results. Traffic from image search has gone by the wayside and the knowledge box has scraped answers to display as a means to keep people on Google and away from those sites that have the full and detailed answer to the question. If zero some game means Google wants to keep it all and give webmasters zero, then I'd agree with the statement.

Maybe it takes seeing it with their own eyes, but I'm grateful my head is no longer buried in the sand.

[Shaddows]

Traffic from image search has gone by the wayside

Absolutely. Google has definitely stolen that traffic, no question. And the result is that many people are stopping G from nicking their images- this is a rational action.

If zero some game means Google wants to keep it all and give webmasters zero, then I'd agree with the statement.

But Google does not keep the traffic. It goes somewhere- even if that is through advertising. But algo changes do not push people to advertising, layout changes do. And layout changes have nothing to do with SEO.

Please check the OP, quoted in full:

We battle for the best representation on Google serps all the time. There is only so much traffic and we all want as much as we can get. When we lose our #1 ranking, we lose traffic and that traffic goes somewhere. It often flows to the new site that took over our #1 spot, which is why many people view the Google serps like a zero sum game.

Let's share how & why we approach Google SEO as zero sum game or why you think it is smarter to take a different view.
[Emphasis Mine]

Look, no one is arguing that Google is not maximising it's profits, specifically through running as much advertising as the product (search) will bear. Or that it increases advertising whenever it figures out a way of doing so without losing users. This is obvious, and unarguable.

But, and this is really important, when you lose traffic, approaching 100% of that traffic goes to a non-Google property. This is what is zero-sum. This is why it makes sense to approach SEO as zero-sum.

Just because your personal experience of traffic changes is only down, it does not mean that the aggregate experience is such. Conflating Google's profits or advertising with absolute traffic is a fallacy.

the knowledge box

Look, if people are satisfied by the answer in the knowledge box, I fail to see how you can monetise them. After all, even Google cannot monetise them - they give the answer away for free! (If I were Google, I would do that paywall "first para free" thing and fade the answer with a "click for full answer" as a paid click. Maybe I should apply for a job?)

[glakes]

But Google does not keep the traffic. It goes somewhere- even if that is through advertising. But algo changes do not push people to advertising, layout changes do.

Let's dissect your statement:

But Google does not keep the traffic. It goes somewhere- even if that is through advertising

Google keeps as much of the traffic as they can. Image search, Knowledge Box, YouTube and many of the hundreds of companies they have a financial stake in receive this traffic. To actually sit there and try to dispute this is absurd, which is why I won't waste anymore time on it.

But algo changes do not push people to advertising, layout changes do.

And why do you think businesses advertise? Because they have spare money laying around? Of course not. Every business wants the most website traffic they can get. When these businesses get pushed off the first page of the serps, to useless crap like I mentioned previously (five year old forum posts, a short whining blog post, Amazon crowding, etc.) they pay to advertise or roll over and die. To say algo changes do not prompt businesses to advertise is foolish. The search results, for many queries, are dummied down and contain domain crowding for a reason. And that reason has nothing to do with quality but instead profitability.

Look, if people are satisfied by the answer in the knowledge box, I fail to see how you can monetise them.

Why stop with answers in the knowledge box. Webmasters also rolled over and gave up their image traffic so why not the whole entire website? Maybe when you invest a lot of time and thousands of dollars in creating a solution to the answer given in the knowledge box you would value the upsell opportunity - allowing you to recoup your initial investment. Regardless, as far as I am concerned the knowledge box is theft which is similar to what happened with images. When will this creep stop stepping on our rights? When people get their heads out of the sand.

[NickMNS]

@glakes

To actually sit there and try to dispute this is absurd, which is why I won't waste anymore time on it.

Make claim, wave hands, repeat. like magic its True!

When will this creep stop stepping on our rights?

Google is private company and has no obligation to you or your business, in terms of organic traffic. If Google would like, tomorrow it could eliminate all organic serps and you could not do anything about it. If you do not like how Google treats you be it in regards to image search or knowledge graph, then simply block Google using your robots.txt, then they can no longer steal from you.

And why do you think businesses advertise?

Every business wants the most website traffic they can get.

No!
Businesses advertise to sell products, that is it.
At the end of the day they should be agnostic to the channel used to sell the product. You judge the efficacy of your channel by the cost invested to use the channel vs the sales or better yet the gross margin provided by the channel (ROI). If the ROI of selling through organic search is lower than the advertising on radio, than advertise on radio.

[heisje]

Google is not a mere corporation like any other : it has become the gate to the internet, for all practical purposes. The cost of keeping this gate running properly is enormous, so regulators (elected representatives and state authorities) have allowed them (by non-intervention) to monetize this gate as they see fit. I believe rightly so. Up to a point.

Meantime, Google have grossly abused their gatekeeper allowance, junkies to their greed for ever higher profits. To keep regulators away, they pass in exchange private user-behaviour information to intelligence services.

Today, nobody knows how long this unholy alliance will last. Google rightly operate under the (rational) assumption that this may not last forever (there are already signs about this - thus their investments in multiple other irrelevant ventures) - while meantime they try to grab as much as they can. In time, there will be regulation. But that time is unknown.

No, the mere notion of "zero sum" is utter nonsense, both in terms of this overall reality, and as many posts above have demonstrated.

.

[NickMNS]

The internet has no gates. Simply type the url of the website you would like to visit in the address bar and voila! the site is displayed on your computer. Do you think you can do better than that site? Great fire up a web server paste some html and voila! now others can come to your website because it is better.

[glakes]

No, the mere notion of "zero sum" is utter nonsense, both in terms of this overall reality, and as many posts above have demonstrated.

That's a great way to sum up the zero sum game theory, and I agree with you 110%. While the typical propaganda polluters are blowing smoke up Google's bum, real businesses press on. Realizing the so called zero sum game is rigged, I chose to bail and am doing just fine. But moving beyond Google does not negate what they have done and the cost it places on economies as a whole. Sooner or later more people will pull their heads from the sand to take a breath and open their eyes to see the light. Until then, keep on keeping on...

[EditorialGuy]

Regardless, as far as I am concerned the knowledge box is theft which is similar to what happened with images.

You could try controlling or blocking Googlebot via meta tags or robots.txt:

[support.google.com...]

[support.google.com...]

Or you might find that knowledge boxes are useful sources of traffic--unless, of course, your Web site merely serves up bite-size facts in the public domain that you acquired from somebody else's Web site, book, etc.

[tangor]

The internet has no gates.

This is true. It does, however, have a couple of Main Streets where folks like to be advertised and appear. And like most Main Streets there are a limited number of spaces available along the "strip".

[glakes]

You could try controlling or blocking Googlebot via meta tags or robots.txt:

It's theft and if we must explicitly enter code on our pages to prevent theft then Google should be liable for the coding costs right? I mean where does this nonsense end? I don't have to post a sign on my front door saying no trespassing to legally keep burglars out, so why should we have to explicitly tell Google to not steal snippets of our content? Being outside the scope of a search engine's role of crawling and categorizing the web, Google should pay royalties or license the information they are taking. But they got away with it for books, so why not treat everything on the internet as being in the public domain and use it?

Many webmasters are content with getting 10% of the image traffic as they did before, maybe 25% of the traffic from the KB, their meta data getting re-written so what's next? Maybe Google can just serve our cached pages from their servers because they load .01 seconds faster? There comes a point when even the most nonsensical people have to realize when webmasters are being taken advantage of. Some just are not there yet, which I realize. But this is the real zero sum game - webmasters are constantly driven to zero (less traffic, less sales, less ROI from ads, etc.) and the owner of the game rigs it so they get it all or at least as much as they can at any given moment.

This is true. It does, however, have a couple of Main Streets where folks like to be advertised and appear. And like most Main Streets there are a limited number of spaces available along the "strip".

Applied to our highway system, we have paid toll roads with gates where one can pay to get to their destination quicker. They even have rest areas on the toll roads where gas stations and restaurants must bid on the contract to lease these locations. Sound familiar?

[tangor]

Preachin' to the choir! :)

[EditorialGuy]

It's theft and if we must explicitly enter code on our pages to prevent theft then Google should be liable for the coding costs right?

It isn't theft. (Facts aren't protected by copyright. Neither are recipes and quite a few other things. Do you seriously believe that the lawyers for the major search engines aren't familiar with copyright law?)

As for having to "explicitly enter code" to control how search crawlers behave, that's just how the Web works. Robots.txt has been around since the early 1990s, long before Google existed.

[MrSavage]

<snip> I wrote a long piece which I decided to self snip. I almost got sucked in, but the expression don't feed the you know what's is a real thing in 2017. Not. Worth. It.

[NickMNS]

I would like to draw attention to the fact that late last week Mozcast reported a major jump in the number of queries showing the knowledge panels. They show a change from an estimate of about 39% of all queries over the past 30 days as compared to now 47% of all queries. Here is a the link to the page [mozcast.com...]

What strikes me about this, is that this spike was large, but there was very little chatter if any here about the negative impacts of this change.

So how is this relevant to this discussion? Many are saying that changes such as more aggressive ad placements and the inclusion of the knowledge graph in serps have a big impact on the traffic they receive, and therefore one cannot view ranking changes as a zero sum game. But I think what we have seen at the end of last week disproves this. My theory is that a new knowledge panel, impacts everyone in the organics serps equally and any change will be marginal.

[MrSavage]

People want to point to some algo change for their drops. It's not about that anymore. It's about a new ad block or new knowledge block rolling out. It's the predatory changes that kill the organics, but that isn't as sexy to talk about. It's better to sell hope than it is reality. Glad to see some real stats on the increase. I use Google first. I know changes because I'm an observant....USER of the product.

[NickMNS]

@MrSavage to be clear, the stats show that changes in serp layout (ad, knowledge panel, etc...) do not seem to cause sudden and noticeable changes in traffic, whereas algo changes do (maybe this is what you meant about sexy i.e. easily explained). This not to say that changes to the serp layout do not have the potential erode organic traffic overtime, I think it is pretty obvious that they do.

[MrSavage]

Ads above the fold do better than ad above the fold. Search position above the fold is better than below the fold. Going lower on a page = bad. Going up on a page = better. What does an increase in answer boxes do to the organic results start position. Seems blatantly simple to understand how this works. If anything contradicts the obvious it's only because the answer box is a work in progress. Technology always improves. It doesn't get worse, it gets better and smarter. Only a matter of time right? The box isn't there to fail, but it may not be fully optimized just yet. I'm not going to second guess the talent in Google to make it better and thus the impact will only increase, not decrease.