30-second summary:
- Google antitrust, the market cases you need to know.
- Google’s featured snippets do not payback content creators.
- How to make content discoverable — no matter the marketing budget.
- Tim Suolo, Ahrefs’ Chief Marketing Officer explains how they intend to level the playing field for smaller players.
While Google faces lawmakers with antitrust cases, it continues making billions from search result ads. Big players invest heavily in professional SEO tools and expertise to help get their content found in Google. Small businesses, nonprofits, and educational institutions struggle to get the organic traffic that their websites deserve. Today Ahrefs, an SEO toolset for digital marketers, releases a new free product – Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – to make SEO more accessible for website owners and help improve the discoverability of valuable content in Google.
Google’s antitrust case: What you need To know
Google faces antitrust issues for its dominance in web search, digital advertising, and smartphone software. Making $160 billion[1] per year from ads in their search results, Google leaves online businesses struggling to get the free organic traffic that their websites deserve.
Travel antitrust crackdown of 2019
In 2019, Expedia Group Inc. saw its biggest revenue drop[2] for 14 years, and TripAdvisor Inc. for two years. This is largely thanks to Google inserting its “Flights” feature into the search results for relevant travel queries.
Back to 2016: Warner’s staff reduction
In 2008, Brian Warner launched CelebrityNetWorth.com to detail celebrity financial information. He hired a team of 10+ people to research the data, maintain its accuracy, and publish the investigations.
In 2016, a Google representative contacted Warner for permission to scrape his data. Warner declined but found his data in Google’s freshly-launched “Featured snippets” nonetheless. As a result, CelebrityNetWorth.com’s traffic