How the Antitrust Ruling Against Google Will Affect Your SEO

The Case & Ruling

October, 2024

This is by no means meant to be a scholarly legal analysis, it's just the general gist of what has been playing out.

In 2020 various states, and the Justice Department, brought a case against Google claiming that they had violated antitrust laws by creating a search monopoly. They based this argument, in part, on the fact that Google pays a lot of money to be the automatic (default) search utility of many devices and web browsers. Doing this, the government argued, allowed Google to create a monopoly of scale and thereby squeeze out any competition. It was argued further that, as a result, Google secured a monopoly over ads and, in turn, drove the cost of ads artificially high.

Google contended their popularity and market share was due to the fact that they are the best search engine and preferred by most web users.

Fast forward to August 5, 2024. Judge Amit Mehta (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia), sided with the government's arguments and found that "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly." That's pretty powerful stuff! 

In the short term, this will likely have no tangible SEO consequence. The ruling did not specify any remedies. That would come later and could include forcing Google to divest some of its search business or the like. However, there will be appeals that drag out, so we would not expect a drastic change to your SEO in the short-term.

This is yet another warning to websites that spend a lot of time on content designed to game Google. This would include spammy content aimed at quantity of keywords versus content to benefit their target market. We have seen trends with sites going overboard to get clicks, even if this means from unqualified traffic. As purists, we believe this is never a good idea even if there are short term gains in clicks, are they converting?

Here are a some common-sense tips for making sure your SEO efforts weather any storm. 

1. Write for your audience while giving context to machines (search engines).
   The ultimate goal is to get your website presented to a user who is searching for something that you offer. It's that simple. Write for your audience. 

   Use words and terms that your current customers or consumers use. Introduce content that you know they would find useful and relevant. Of course, there are times when you may need to serve a few different audiences. Create unique pages with content intended for each. Do not mix unrelated messages. Do not make your web visitor work too hard to find their optimal user journey.
   
   You will also want to be mindful to give context to your content. This helps search engines understand what you are talking about. For instance, if you have a section or page dedicated to how you help clients with financial planning, you do not want to forget the "financial" in it all. Image if your title tag, meta descriptions or H tags all speak to your expertise in Planning, Road Mapping, Consulting etc... You know what you mean, so you may not recognize that those terms, without context, could mean many, many different things to anyone else. What sort of "planning?" 

2. Use schemas where appropriate. 
   While your web visitors will not see these schemas, they are designed to give machines important, readable context. Schema.org is your best friend in this area. There are new schemas being developed all of the time. 
    

3. Pay attention to identifying canonical pages.
   There are certainly times where having very similar content in various sections of your site makes sense for your audience. As mentioned in point one, you may be serving more than one type of audience, and some of the content may overlap. You do not want to jump your user around from a journey that they started into some other section of the site just because you have similar content intended for all users and want it on one page. 

   If you have identical, or very similar pages across your site, set one as the canonical. Take the guess work away from the search engines. 

4. Monitor the overall performance health of your site.
   Image optimization, fast load times, these are universal optimizations. They are also the most neglected because it may involve relying on the help of your IT staff, who may not know how to do this well. Users and search engines appreciate, no, demand a high performing site.
    
5. Keep your website tidy!
   Regularly review your analytics and run site scans to address 404's, orphaned pages and broken links. Make sure your videos play and your images load. Ensure your forms, if you have them, actually submit. If you find, by looking at your analytics, there are pages or sections that get very little traction, review the content for relevance. There is no need to keep everything on your site if no one is looking at it. It is just overhead at that point. If the overlooked content is highly relevant move it or promote it.
    
6. Spend time on off-site brand awareness.
   Search engines are not the only way to get traffic to your site.

It can be difficult in a Google centric internet, but, if you regard SEO as a set of best practices regardless of search engine, you will realize long term stability.