Google Search Results Circumvent the Need to Visit Most Sites

A person in a large online marketing and SEO discussion forum found an article about Wikipedia losing 3 billion organic search visits to Google last year. The article blames zero-click results and YouTube videos for the loss. The article goes on to state that out of about 900,000 monthly searches around the world, only 30,000 of them pair with a website.

In the article, the author discusses a big impact on website traffic. For example, only 15 percent of searches about Los Angeles weather conditions return a click and visit to the popular website weather.com. This could be due to the fact that the current weather conditions are shown at the top of the page along with a weather forecast. The user does not have to click a link in order to get the information they want.

The article continued with a discussion that even five years ago, Google managed to steal 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months of time. That trend is continuing at a high rate. The person who shared this article and observation wanted to know what other marketers thought and if they agreed with the author's argument about Google "stealing" links.

As can be expected, everybody who read the article had a different opinion about it. One person wondered if doing this was Google's way of getting people to spend more money on paid AdWords. Another person wondered about if people might initiate a class action lawsuit against Google because the search engine uses their copyrighted information without permission or paying for it. Most people thought this would never happen.

Some other people had thoughts to share about consumers using a different search engine. They argued that if more people stopped using Google as their search engine, maybe Google would notice and make some changes to their business practices. Several people disagreed with that idea, stating that Google has political power and a lot of money. Publishers have to play Google's game if they are going to get noticed. Other search engines often follow the lead of Google for generating income and updating algorithms. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/h0ird7/wikipedialost3billionorganicsearchvisits_to/.