BluShark Digital 0:00
Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price 0:11
Welcome, everybody. We are so glad to have Rand with us. Welcome, Rand.
Rand Fishkin 0:16
Good to be here, Seth. Thanks for having me.
Seth Price 0:17
So much going on since we last spoke. But in the last weeks, we’ve seen an explosion. We’ve seen data in an area that nobody was expecting to see data from. Wake up one morning, I’m like “Rand’s all over this.” So, tell us, with a little bit of perspective, what does that data trove tell us?
Rand Fishkin 0:39
Yeah, so, I mean, I think this is, you know, if I had a dream scenario for all the years that I worked in SEO, it was that Google’s ranking factors would become public, right? That the search engine would basically say: “Hey, you know what, here’s all the things that we measure and use. There’s nothing outside this list that’s not used. So, you can see everything that we do.” And, I believe, I always believed that that would make Google more secure. I thought that they would be less prone to spam, less prone to manipulation. I thought that more people would do more high quality content creation and better marketing if they knew these things. Google, of course, disagreed, which is their prerogative. But, thankfully, some Google insider, someone on the search engineering team, fairly small team, right? We’re talking under a couple 100 folks who have access to the API documentation for the full functionality of Google search. Someone either intentionally or accidentally uploaded the entire repository for all the calls that you make for YouTube search, for Google Maps and local search, for Google web search, for news search, for Android search, from the Google Lens. All of it was uploaded to GitHub in March and left public for about a month and then taken down. But there was a copy that was that was made on HexDocs. And I think a few people sort of quietly were using that for their own personal edification. And then a gentleman who initially wanted to remain anonymous, and he’s now come out, Erfan Azimi, contacted me. And, Erfan was like, “Hey, Rand. I have this crazy document of everything that Google uses in their ranking system.”
Seth Price 2:30
What was your first reaction when you heard this?
Rand Fishkin 2:32
No way. I mean, this is embarrassing. Seth, when Erfan first contacted me, I let the email sit for a few days. And I replied and was like, “This is… Come on, man. There’s no way.”
Seth Price 2:44
Right? I get a lot of these things, right? They got to tell you exactly.
Rand Fishkin 2:47
It just didn’t seem possible or credible. And, of course, I’d never met Erfan before. So, we didn’t have a relationship. He emailed me out of the blue. And then after I, you know, I sort of scheduled a call with him, like, it didn’t sound completely wild. And so I scheduled a call with him. And when he showed it to me, as we were walking through, I think I took a screenshot and shared it on the blog post. You can see my face is kind of, you know, just: “What am I? What am I looking at? Is this my dream come true for the last quarter century finally made real?” And that, yeah, that’s what it was.
Seth Price 3:23
So what, you know, there’s a lot of stuff in there, right? It’s not like, as SEOs, we were completely off going down. You know, every everything we’ve been talking about is essentially there. And it’s not like these documents give you everything because there’s waiting, etc., which is very significant, right? About how you prioritize. So, you spend more time digging through this, thinking about it than most. What are your biggest takeaways? What can we learn that we didn’t know before this was out.
Rand Fishkin 3:56
I mean, that list is quite long, and it grows every day. You know, someone tagged me on LinkedIn today because they found some new stuff in the league. I haven’t had a chance to go through it yet. But you know that there’s all sorts of scores and references to things where we’re not 100% sure what they mean. For example, there’s something called a Keto score, which we think has something to do with the health of a website or page. And people are trying to, like tie that together. Dan Petrovic sent me an email about what he thinks that is and tied it back to some patent applications that Google had made a few years ago. But big, big picture, I think the initial huge takeaways, one of the big ones for sure, is that people speculated for a long time that Google Analytics data was being used inside of Google search as a way to like, you know, measure success or whatever. That’s not the case. They’re using Chrome, right? Google Chrome is very clearly stated as collecting all the URLs that people visit, how long they spend on them, what else loads for them, where they go before and after, what the journey looks like. And this makes a lot of sense, right? But to be honest, I have never seen people correctly, sort of, attributed and say: “Oh, it’s obviously Google Chrome that is collecting all the data that’s being used to measure searcher and journey success and happiness.”
Seth Price 5:26
You probably wouldn’t be able to objectively. Does it make a difference to the SEO in the sense that they are basically taking a subset of all searches that are done on Chrome because it’s easier to? But theoretically if that is a, unless Chrome users are markedly different, then should it matter?
Rand Fishkin 5:47
I completely agree. And also, it’s one of those interesting things where if you have websites or properties that may be getting very small portions of Chrome and very high portions of other stuff, you could be missing out on some ranking signals. And also, I think, there’s tons of activities that SEOs have never thought was in their purview. Like, that’s not my job. I don’t have to worry about that. But, in fact, it is in their job. And they do have to worry about it. For example, driving traffic from sources that are not Google. This is obviously a huge ranking signal. I don’t think SEOs, SEOs, kind of, at least in my day, right?
Seth Price 6:33
No, no. So, you’ve been out of the hardcore, but for us, the ones that are sort of actively still in the trenches digging these ditches, you know, traffic is certainly. In fact, I’ll tell you the piece that I’m waiting for, maybe you have the answer. That frustrated me, because traffic is certainly a ranking. You know, we saw it a lot with recent updates, because TV and offline advertisers got a huge advantage because of the traffic branded searches coming in. So a) we saw traffic that way. But I’ve seen it through low dollar social when people are, you know, sending people traffic, for sure. In fact, the part that I thought was sort of dubious, and I’ve always been frustrated by, but seems to be a truism that I’ve never been able to get somebody at Google to address is paid search on Google, right? So, they’ve not not talked about third party. But the idea that, you know, we saw people get out of the sandbox for a brand-new site significantly faster with paid search than without. And so.
Rand Fishkin 7:34
And I would. Look, I think it’s still sort of a conspiracy theory a little bit. The documentation has no specification, suggesting that paid search clicks are removed from the Chrome traffic data.
Seth Price 7:49
And that’s the point, right? Meaning, if it is traffic, and traffic is significant, there you go. That’s confirming, so there are things that for some of us, and again, you’re like my hero, my person I followed, you know, with all this stuff. But you know, as our last conversation put out, I mean, you’ve taken a step back, and you’re looking at stuff, and you’re not yourself away from the shovel that’s digging and thinking about how we’re going to change the world in a positive way. You know, the traffic has always been one. But I guess it’s like anything else? You know, we say a lot of things, both to ourselves, our team, our clients, from stage. And, you know, you’re sort of hoping it’s right, and you do the best you can. It’s nice when you actually see something that says yes.
Rand Fishkin 8:37
I think that’s honestly. I think that this is one of the things that I really hope comes out of this is that over the next few years, right? This leak will be in my opinion relevant for at least the next four or five years, right? Certainly, it’ll be the case that, you know, you’ll see Google’s ranking systems move on maybe half a decade, a decade from now. But you can look inside the documentation right now and see that things they created in 2007, 8, 12, 13, 15 are still used and core to the system, to the ranking systems today. Because they worked then. That’s how the web worked, and it still works that way. And it’s not, it’s not like, you know, this technology has evolved that much. So, I hope that clients will say, “Hey, you know, you’re recommending that I do this. Is there something in the documentation that Google has that says that this is actually a ranking factor? Or, is this an indirect ranking factor that’s gonna affect something that’ll change our ranking?” So, I think it’ll do that. One big discovery in their mentions, right? So, entity mentions without a link are clearly a ranking element. We don’t know how much it’s weighted. I hope that lots of people in SEO are doing lots of testing around this right now. Because it well could be the case that it’s weighted as much, could be even weighted more. We don’t know, right? An entity mentioned. And then they look around the text, right? And they calculate sort of distance and associations, entity associations, they have a score for confirming how confident they are. Confidence entity score that looks at whether they’re confident that the entity mentioned is referring to a particular domain or product or brand. And so if your product naming conventions are off. I like to use the example “Thai food near me.” Right? Some clever, you know, restaurant. Yeah. Seems like a good SEO decision. Probably a terrible SEO decision.
Seth Price 8:37
Yes and no. It’s a local search thing. And it’ll be like if you’re naming a national brand, okay, fine. But if you’re like trying to get the advantage on a little tiny search during the period of time. And this is the piece that I wish you could see, you know, if there was a way way back machine. Although fascinating story on CBS Sunday Morning about that whole organization. If you haven’t seen it, definitely. There are lawsuits.
Rand Fishkin 9:57
About which organization?
Seth Price 11:06
Way way back? The group that handles the way way back machine.
Rand Fishkin 11:13
Oh, okay. Okay. Archive.org. Yeah.
Seth Price 11:15
Yeah, yeah, they started with just the internet, which is kind of cool. And then they started doing books and movies. And shockingly, people were not pleased about that, who own the copyrights to the books and movies and they have gazillions of dollars of lawsuits. Some of which had been found against them. They’re appealing. Like, I’m like, you’re out of your mind, you have this amazing stuff. And now they’re like documenting every book they can get. Anyway, we digress. Was there anything that you saw, the opposite end, where we thought something was there, but it was not. However, it’s hard, because it’s like, it’s like a Supreme Court case, where people are like scrolling through the pages, and then they’re thinking about it for weeks and months. Is there anything there that’s gone the opposite way for you?
Rand Fishkin 11:58
So far, no one’s found anything that directly ties to E-E-A-T. It doesn’t appear that there’s a specific metric for expertise or authority or trust, or, yeah, they’re just not there. And that I think that’s quite surprising, right? That Google has been talking about these things. And I think these things are correlated with a lot of signals that are in here. We’re talking about 14,000 features, right? So, you and I have talked about two so far, three? You know, but there’s things in there, like YouTube mentions. I never knew that they scan the transcript of YouTube videos and looked at how popular the video was, and tried to topic analysis the video and then looked for mentions of a brand name or an entity name, and then tied that to a website and said, “hey, if a brand is getting a bunch of mentions on popular YouTube videos, we should rank it higher.” I never knew that. That is completely new.
Seth Price 12:54
And that’s one of those areas that a lot of people parked on, because they think it would separate. It’s just, that’s just YouTube. And you’re like, “No, it’s Google.”
Rand Fishkin 13:01
I mean, hey, you know, this is link building, right? So if you build a bunch of links, but there’s, it is not accompanied by news articles, by increased chrome traffic, by entity mentions, right, all these other sorts of things that tend to correlate with a natural growth in links, Google’s gonna discount it, right? And you can see it right in there. They basically have this like, system for discounting links that come without these other signals.
Seth Price 13:33
And it’s frustrating, because I see this. I look at myself, I look at competitors that we’re playing against, and we can read all this, we can see it. But some of those links, Juice, like they’re, you know. Gyi, one of my good buddies in the space, you know, Matt links, but the links, they do drive things. And there’s a question of. Right now, I think there’s a big question of like, it does not appear that there’s an actual penalty unless you go as far to get a manual action penalty.
Rand Fishkin 14:03
That’s right. You look in the docs. There’s nothing. There’s nothing that penalizes. It’s only things that are discounted.
Seth Price 14:10
Correct, which means that if you’re going to take a shot. I have a friend who had this amazing daily page of legitimate negative SEO. It’s very, very rare that happened, but a legitimate case of it for something that I knew was out there. And they were. And that when you get. And of those awful links that were pointed at his site, well, they were absurd, a certain percentage of them may not have been discounted. And that gave a. And so you’re sort of left with this odd place, which is you’re not getting, you know, a definitive path for E-A-T. Not that we aren’t all moving in that direction, because everything you just said is a piece of that, right? Having authority that somebody is respecting enough to link back to you is the link that they are going for from that point of view. But is this, you know, are there many things that Google has said, told us to do, where they’re like, “Hey, we know that you’re going to move the needle as much as we needed to. We may not be able to measure that specifically, but we want people. That’s a better web results.” And we’re just going to tell people to do it. And a fair percentage of people, including myself, are going to follow what they say.
Rand Fishkin 15:24
Sure, I mean, let’s see. So I think there’s Google’s kind of marketing messaging. And E-A-T, as I understand it, is, I guess, it’s a reasonable way to explain, to broadly sort of explain the things that Google’s other metrics are attempting to measure. Fair, that’s fine, right? The one thing I don’t think is in there, well, there’s probably many things that are not in there. But popularity is obviously something they care very much about, right? And they’re. If you put content on certain types of websites, it will outperform other types of websites. Google has always denied that they have anything like site authority, or, you know, a domain authority or anything like that. But you can see in the docs, there must be literally 50 or 60 metrics that are looking at the entire site and saying, how, you know, how important is this website?
Seth Price 16:24
They have to. That that that code? I mean, you can’t not.
Rand Fishkin 16:26
Sure. I mean, Seth, I’m not arguing that like, they don’t do it. I’m just saying, it seems ridiculous on its face to say, “No, we don’t have that. We’ve never had that.” And then you get the leak, and you’re like, “Well, you have it in like 50 places, bro.” Like, why the lie?
Seth Price 16:44
It’s not a question of waiting. It’s clearly a thing at some level.
Rand Fishkin 16:47
Just super clear, right? Super simple.
Seth Price 16:49
But, that’s also where you get what I was saying before is, it shouldn’t lose the credibility when they say don’t or do.
Rand Fishkin 16:55
Yes, I think if I had one big takeaway from the leak, right, and I mentioned this when I when I wrote about it, it’s that I don’t think it is responsible journalism or responsible professional conduct, to repeat things that Google’s representative say, uncritically. I just don’t think that’s okay. I think that is disregard for integrity. I think that is a disregard for history. I think that’s a disregard for your fellow professionals, right?
Seth Price 17:28
I get it. And look, we see it on the macro on the political scale. Sure, you’d like to think your leaders tell you everything that’s true. I mean, they’re, they’re going through seven different permutations, that if they do this, this reaction will happen. This many people die, the stock market’s gonna go here, and therefore, you know, you’re in a situation where they want something, the question is, are they going to tell you exactly what’s real? Or what they think is going to get them to the answer that they want?
Rand Fishkin 17:55
Yeah, well, and I think politics is a good example, where most, almost every observer does not, you know, whatever it is, right? Your local congressional candidate says something at a rally or a speech, you take that with a grain of salt, right? And you go and do your research and sort of you don’t just trust that what they said is exactly what’s true or what’s right. If they say, you know, “oh, this crime is terrible.” You know, you go and look at the crime stats, you’re like, gosh, crime, crime has barely been better in the last 25 years, right, like we’re at, we’re at one of the lowest crime points in the last century. What are you talking about? Granted, that doesn’t mean that someone who’s affected by crime isn’t, you know, having a rough time. That’s not what I’m saying. But I think unfortunately, if you go to whatever Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, SC Roundtable, Twitter, all these places where search professionals share information, you will see, “Google says xyz.” That is not a headline, I think that anyone should be publishing, right? A headline could be “Google says xyz. The data confirms.” Or, “most experts or most data is suggesting is accurate or inaccurate.”
Seth Price 18:42
To be fair, it’s day one, and they’ll push back a little bit. Like, I mean, what they are saying is a starting point. Then, the question is, what do the experts then think of that? Is the next meeting? Like there’s a. I don’t know. To me, if they’re saying it, I take it very seriously. And until I figure out that it’s not true, not that I’m doing. Look, nothing in SEO is a knee-jerk reaction, but I will on face value and, like with a politician, I trust I will take it in and then critically think about is there another layer to it? But I mean, getting on the headline itself, they don’t give us that much, that we just got a lot, but it is and maybe these documents are showing, proving your point that we really never should have been. And like I’ve always lived that way. It’s you know, what is being said? And look we talked about this offline, you know, how is Google telling you to behave? Versus how are they behaving when it comes to paid search, integration, and organic results? You know, they’re telling you don’t be misleading and yet things that they’re. So, it’s, you know, there’s also certain about they hold the cards and until an antitrust suit says otherwise, you know, they can do certain things that they wish.
Rand Fishkin 20:22
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that you can clearly see is lots of self-preferencing behavior, right? So just an incredible amount of Google saying, “Well, this search, for example, produces video results, therefore show YouTube. Obviously, you know, historically, there are dozens, hundreds of sites that have video on them that are not just YouTube. I remember back in my Moz days, for folks who don’t know, I used to run a company called Moz, which is in the, which was the SEO software space. And at Moz, I had this video series called Whiteboard Friday which was very popular and tens of thousands of marketers watched it every week. And we used to take that video and embed it on the pages, right, using Wistia, which I still use it SparkToro, right. We have tons of video that we produce. I host it with Wistia. I really like those guys, I think the world of them. Chris Savage is one of our investors. And so, you know, the Wistia embed is great, it performs beautifully. It doesn’t have any pre-roll ads. It doesn’t make Google any money. And we use it.
Seth Price 21:25
And why do you think it’s an SEO for years and years. We use the YouTube embed. Because did I have that document? No. But Deep Throat Senate right back in the Watergate days, follow the money.
Rand Fishkin 21:38
Follow the money. And that’s exactly what you can do. In fact, my co-founder, Casey, when he worked at Wistia, published a blog post, I think, in July of 2013, or 14. And you can see, on that day, it went from, you know, 60% of all video results in Google were YouTube to 99%. Right? So someone just flipped a switch, some executive said, “Hey, why are we sending video traffic to anywhere, but YouTube? Stop that. And an engineer flipped the switch.
Seth Price 22:07
Quarterly earnings were coming out.
Rand Fishkin 22:08
Yep.
Seth Price 22:08
And they needed to get it up. And.
Rand Fishkin 22:09
There you go. They wanted YouTube to go up. And that has persisted to this day, which, you know, if I were at the Department of Justice, I would be saying that is illegal abuse of monopoly power. Because why why was antitrust created? Antitrust was created, Seth, because a railroad in the 1890s, right, said to every steel producer in the country, you cannot ship your steel on our railroad. And that is using, illegally using your monopoly power in one sector, one sector to unfairly compete in another. And what is search if not today’s railroad? And what is video if not today, steel?
Seth Price 22:52
That’s the snippet. That’s our snippet. No, look, I went to law school. I was presenting to a bunch of lawyers and judges in Fort Lauderdale years ago. I flew down, and we’re talking about marketing, and the judges could care less and talking about Google search, and one guy starts yelling at me, it’s like, “why do you allow Google to do this?” And it literally, excuse me. “You know, why don’t? Why don’t Why don’t? Why don’t you do something about this?” And I’m like, I’m one poor schmuck like, you’re the judges. It’s like, if, the only way this is going to change from the game that we’re playing is an antitrust. And I think that if anything, that to me, you know, you share it, to me was what I got was the inner workings within Google. And that when and if that ever becomes right, for the antitrust case, they may come through Europe, they may be. But that this type of preference is the quiet stuff. That’s going to be very juicy in those cases.
Rand Fishkin 23:53
Yeah. I mean, YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Search should be three companies. They should be broken up. I believe that is the only correct remedy for the current situation that we’re in. And, you know, I’d love to see Lina Khan pursue it. I don’t know if she will. But I’ll say this as well, which is the YouTube example is one of hundreds, right? Google Flights obviously puts themselves ahead of every other flight search with no need to try and compete, right? Google Hotel, the same thing. Google Maps, Google Finance, Google News.
Seth Price 24:28
The way, like I, like it’s amazing because you start to see it and like the younger people, that they’re first you, they’re there. And I’m part of the, and I’m like, oh shit, this is better. And it’s integrated. So before we talk to some of your exciting announcements to come, I want to just spend a moment with you and get your thoughts if you have any, on the AI content sort of world and what is going on, right? We’re, you know, we’ve had a good period of time with ChatGPT becoming a thing. We’ve had Google sort of say a bunch of things. They weren’t first mover, they’re putting it out there. But it’s, they clearly don’t want to just have a mess all over the web with AI content just ducked. They haven’t said we’re penalizing AI content. What are your thoughts on the balance as an SEO between the race to create high quality, inexpensive content? Versus what clients are yapping for? Which is, hey, why can’t we just push a button and put content here? Clearly not the right answer. But where do you, where do you fall that continuum?
Rand Fishkin 25:39
I suspect the nuance here is there are probably a small number of use cases where AI-generated or AI-assisted content could make reasonable sense, especially when you’re sort of producing a large scale. And the information is, tends to be more useful in sort of small snippet format. So I’m thinking of like rows in a table or bullet points that, you know, extract data from a complex source and make it sort of simple and obvious. I think categorization is a fine and clever use of AI. I’ve used AI for a lot of categorization types of things. However, oftentimes, when people say AI-assisted content or AI content creation, I think what people mistakenly take away is, oh, it should write all my articles. And, you know, 99.9% of the time, I would say, that’s the wrong choice. And you should be. You should be rooting for all your competitors to do it, because it will make it easy to stand out, right? One of the easiest ways to stand out in a crowded field is through unique differentiation. And if everybody starts pursuing AI-generated content, I mean, it’s so easy to see it these days, right? I haven’t been able to figure out why exactly, but when I read anything that’s made by an AI, I always go: “Oh, I’m pretty sure that’s ChatGPT. Oh, I think that’s Bard. Yeah, that looks like Gemini, right?” Like I can, I can feel it.
Seth Price 27:21
I think that we’re. And by using third party tools, right, this is sort of where the dump sort of comes back into play, is when using third party tools. We are. We can see what looks to be. We can tell pretty quickly. I don’t have Rand sitting in my desk. So, I use the tool to tell me what it’s, you know, when it when it’s when it’s one of those. But my feeling is that Google, which has an economic incentive not to allow this to happen, is working on this. If it’s not.
Rand Fishkin 27:50
You know, Google. I mean, I don’t want to, you know, dismiss them. Obviously, they still have plenty of power and influence. But I will say this, if your content ranks in Google, but it converts no one, and it does not make anyone prefer your brand, and it does not drive the action that you’re seeking, what was the point of ranking? Why are you doing it?
Seth Price 28:15
Right. Right. But there’s a world where ranking itself does have a success, that even if it’s, you know, meaning that if you’re there with a phone number, there’s a certain amount of power to that, even if it’s not the most compelling content. That said, I’m not advocating for people to do that. But there are plenty of people out there that would trade readability for visibility.
Rand Fishkin 28:38
Yeah, I mean, local search is a little bit funny, right? You mentioned like get your phone number kind of into the maps pack or at the top or whatever,
Seth Price 28:45
No, even for a national search. If you come up for something, and you have a contact form and a phone number, you will make money you’ll make more if it’s something that resonates with people.
Rand Fishkin 28:56
I mean, I don’t know that I universally agree with that statement, Seth. I think there are a tremendous number of examples of people ranking for things and getting next to no business from it. And that.
Seth Price 29:11
You just have to deal with people that have a more discerning audience than mine. So, let’s wrap this up. You have some exciting news to talk about for the SparkToro extended world and wanted to hear a little. What’s going on in your space?
Rand Fishkin 29:25
Yeah, so SparkToro came out with this, this new v2 right, which SparkToro? Not an SEO tool for folks. So, if you’re in SEO, I don’t know if SparkToro will be relevant to you, but it provides audience research. So basically, what we do is we collect lots of data about people’s behaviors and demographics on the web. And then you can analyze those to sort of say, “okay, people who visit this website also visit these sites, also pay attention to these social accounts, also subscribe to these YouTube channels. You know, listen to these podcasts etc. To do that, one of the key components that we need is Clickstream panel data. And so we’ve been working with Datos, which is run by my good friend Eli Goodman out in New York. And Datos has this wonderfully massive, you know, tens of millions of devices panel that collects every URL it’s visited, very similar to the Clickstream Chrome data that Google uses inside their own ranking systems. And thanks to this Clickstream data, we can, we can see, you know, all sorts of fascinating detail, including a study I published earlier this year is: “Who still sends traffic on the web?” Spoiler alert, Google sends a huge majority of the direct traffic on the web. But Google is only about 10% of the consumed content on the web, right? It’s all these other places where people consume, and research things, and then they go to Google to search to find the brand. The interesting thing that we’re coming out with, I think, probably right around the time this episode airs is a new look at zero-click searches at searches that resulted in a click to a Google owned property: YouTube, maps, local news, images, all that kind of stuff, hotels, flights, et cetera, et cetera. And the percent that goes to the open web, right, to all of our websites. And, the spoiler is, so we compared both United States searchers and EU searchers, we looked at both mobile and desktop, we looked at it for the first five months of 2024. We were particularly interested in May, because that’s when Google had rolled out this AI overviews and supposedly was taking all this traffic, or maybe it wasn’t taking all this traffic. And that, you know, I’ll urge folks to go check out the study itself, which would be on the SparkToro blog. But the things that I found really interesting, Seth were one, Google when they rolled out AI Overviews, I don’t see much of a bump, there’s a little bump, but I didn’t see a ton of a bump in zero-click searches skyrocketing. It seems to be the case that what Sundar Pichai said is true, which is those AI Overviews actually do result in more, enough additional searches to make up for the zero-click searches that they consume, which is, which is quite interesting. And the second thing is, Google is, for every thousand searches, on average, that are done in the United States, that results in about 360 clicks to the open web. And, and the worst news is only about half of those go to anything outside the top 200 sites. So.
Seth Price 32:43
A lot to think about, a lot to unpack. But.
Rand Fishkin 32:47
You know, hopefully, again, this is one of those things where, if you’re interested in antitrust, if you’re interested in policy.
Seth Price 32:53
That was what I was, as you’re saying this to me, whoever is putting the justice, which is literally like a stone’s throw from where I’m sitting. You know, whoever putting this together, I mean, you should be their best buddy, because this sounds like the data that will eventually make a case.
Rand Fishkin 33:09
I think there’s a strong case to be made that, essentially, Google’s combination of self-preferencing and self-answering behaviors have created much more of a closed ecosystem than an open one. And while there’s still traffic to be had from Google, right, you know, we’re talking about billions of searches, so even if it’s only, you know, fifteen or twenty percent of all searches can result in a click to anyone’s website outside the top 200. Even when that’s true, across billions of searches, there’s still a lot of value to be had from Google rankings, but I think what digital marketers often miss out on is the huge quantity of brand value to be had outside of Google’s ecosystem. And even if your entire goal is just get Google rankings, you probably should still be doing lots of things outside of Google’s ecosystem, because that is how they measure and rank and determine whether you’re going to be included.
Seth Price 34:12
Right, right. Great words to leave us with. Rand, thank you so much. This is fascinating, as always, and, you know, as you continue to go through, you know, I use one of the Supreme Court opinion, the others like a Talmudic scroll, where you’re trying to like, you know, get those pieces. I don’t think that we’ve seen the last of it in the sense that it is going to take some time with you know, if you take what we see in the British Museum, where we got to see the three different languages on one tablet. You know, once we see the Rosetta Stone which actually takes this data or this information, and lets us figure out what that means in order of magnitude, that’s going to, whoever finds that missing piece, not that this was an extremely enlightening, but that will be the game changer.
Rand Fishkin 35:04
Oh, absolutely, I really, Seth, I really look forward to and I truly encourage lots of folks in the search profession to go dig through these, you know, thousands and thousands of features and attributes and try and identify ones that, you know, so far are a mystery, figure out what those might mean, test some things and then report on them. I think that is going to be a really powerful way to both have a competitive advantage and also to, you know, do for this community what I think has made SEO wonderful. Like all the years that I worked in SEO, what I loved is people helping other people succeed, in spite of the fact that that didn’t always produce better results for them. I think that that camaraderie that shared sense of community, that friendship and kindness. That’s why I loved SEO world. And I hope that there’s more of it to come.
Seth Price 35:57
I do. And I almost feel like as you say that, it is screaming for some sort of open source document where people can put that information, because otherwise everyone’s just working on their own finding, their own little tidbit, but it is the collaboration of all that together that’s going to be able to have any meaningful insight as to what we’re looking at.
Rand Fishkin 36:14
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Seth Price 36:15
Cool. Thank you so much. We look forward to catching up again real soon.
Rand Fishkin 36:19
All right. Thanks for having me. Seth. Take care.
Seth Price 36:21
Bye bye.
BluShark Digital 36:22
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s website.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
