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Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Startups

Google in 2020: From Everyone’s Search Engine to Everyone’s Competitor

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’ve written a lot this year about the shifts we’re seeing from Google — moving from search engine to answer to engine and now to a direct competitor for an enormous number of websites and businesses. Today, I’m sharing the latest numbers from our friends at Jumpshot on Google’s Q3 CTRs (using their recently updated estimation methodology), and providing some…
Data Marketing

Marketers Say Most of Google’s Public Statements Are False or Misleading

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In July and August of 2019, 1,589 web marketers completed an online questionnaire as part of SparkToro’s Google Ranking Factors Survey. The survey aggregated marketers’ perceptions of the ranking elements used by Google’s search engine. But… it also asked a set of questions around the level of trust in Google’s public statements. Those results are shared for the first time…
Data Marketing

Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero-clicks. Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable source of information on what happens inside…
Data Marketing

How Much of Google’s Search Traffic is Left for Anyone But Themselves?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In December of 2018, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was asked a set of questions by the United States Congress. His responses left… a lot… to be desired. Source: Google 12/11/2018 Congressional Hearing Notes Thankfully, when I told friends from clickstream data provider Jumpshot about this, they were able to send me numbers that give far better answers to Congress and…
Startups

As the Antitrust Case Against Google Kicks Off, Here’s Where the DOJ Should Start

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Google has been, in many ways, a positive force in the worlds of technology, society, convenience, and information dissemination. It’s hard to argue that any of the other tech giants (save, perhaps, Microsoft) have done as much to improve numerous aspects of the lives of people around the world. But in building services outside their core web search business —…
Marketing

An Unpopular List of Marketing Trends for 2019

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This morning, after celebrating Geraldine’s James Beard Writing Award nomination, I foolishly Google’d “marketing trends 2019“. I’m working on some presentations, and was hoping to tie back… blah blah blah… doesn’t matter. What matters is that the results are awful. Nachos-with-fake-cheese awful. Freezer-burned-waffles awful. Gas-station-hot-dog awful. Just like you’d expect, there’s a bunch of lists from the usual suspects —…
Data Marketing

Google’s European Monopoly (& Shrinking Click-Through Opportunities)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In Europe, Google dominates the search landscape even more so than in the United States. In spite of the EU’s regulatory and hefty penalties on the search giant, and despite the anecdotally stronger desire I’ve heard from European consumers to have alternatives, Google runs Europe’s web landscape. Thanks to our friends at Jumpshot, whose clickstream panel covers billions of searches…
Startups

Why We’re Putting A Bunch of Our Savings into TinySeed

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Geraldine and I have a pretty good financial situation going. We’re in our late thirties (which, according to this ridiculous TV graphic, means we’re in a non-existent generation). We’re somewhere between the 80th-90th percentile in savings for American families (source). And we have several sources of income — our books, my startup, Geraldine’s writing+blog content licensing, some investments, speaking, and…
Marketing Startups

Can You Still Blog Your Way to Visibility & Credibility?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In the last handful of years, I’ve had a creeping sense that blog readership is dropping across the web, even as the quantity of organizations and people producing posts has grown. Stats, unfortunately, are hard to come by. Most all of the readership data is from blogging’s golden era — 2001-2012 (or so) — when several reputable organizations regularly published…

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