You have probably heard the news that Google is currently being investigated along with Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
During the preliminary hearings, a few things have come to light.
Can we just say, wow…
It confirms what we already knew, that many of the Google team who communicate regularly with the SEO community have been straight up telling us lies for years.
Ms. Demings stated during the hearing that in 2019 “Google made 80% of its total revenue through the selling of ad space through the use of PPC campaigns”.
Representing Google, Sundar Pichai admitted to having “other means of collecting user data in terms of ads and personalised ads”.
Most of these documents presented in court are over 10 years old, and it shows they had the ability to do things that are considered ‘recent’ in SEO terms.
They confirm they have and use to a certain degree, data from clicks, youtube views, gmail, search logs, browser history, chrome tab data, and android call data as part of search.
These emails date way back to 2012.
You can check out the hearings yourself here on https://judiciary.house.gov/calendar/eventslisting.aspx?EventTypeID=215
The evidence presented on how they use data to affect vertical search and web search in general is just plain dirty.
It means that much of what appears isn’t based on what is the best result (we already assumed this was the case), but instead what is most likely to be popular with the user.
For us this is completely unethical, and explains so much of what we see happening today in the SEO world.
Google is a popular engine that promotes the filter bubble effect because it improves their bottom-line.
From now on you can improve your SEO immensely by doing two things...
- Come up with ways to make your website popular without having to rely only on organic traffic.
- Stop listening to the search liaison team who have literally said this stuff isn’t true e.g. tracking clicks, which these hearings have just shown us has actually been true for over 10 years.
At Gekkoshot we have been helping clients with SEO for over 14 years and its safe to say we have seen a lot of changes come and go.
Contact us today for a quick chat to see how we can help you steer your site in 2020.