Mozcon 2017: Rand Fishkin

DISCLAIMER: This post is written as a live blog from Mozcon. There may be typos and grammar to make my high school English teachers weep. Please excuse those … it’s a fast-paced conference with back-to-back sessions and no time for proofing or even proper writing.

Kicking off Mocon 2017 Rand Fishkin takes the stage. Chatting about what Google's up to.

• Reservations (spa, etc.)
• Cultural content. Google breaking into the content world. He views it as dangerous.
• Carousel lists (disintermediating lists). Stealing clicks and Rand views this as a violating of the social contract between engines.
• Mostly ignoring link spam rather than penalizing it. He views this as a license to spam-and-jam.
• Google facing this first threat in years with Amazon Alexa.
• Google lost their first big case to the tune of $2.7 billion. Rand views this as positive.
• They're paying professors to write positive research of their products and systems.

But they are still the behemoth.  Here's the breakdown of share ... 2017 is trending about 10 to 15% higher in search volume. It turns out that SEO isn't being cannibalized by Google's own results. Even with featured snippets, the traffic has remained flat for the past few years.

• Google comes in at 59.2% of all referral traffic to sites. This frightens Rand. Reddit comes in at 5.4.
• Facebook tends to only send traffic to the top 10 sites where Google sends it everywhere. This puts us in a Google world.

He reminds us that this is the 10th year and in year one the snacks were donuts (the only thing they could afford). You can download his deck here.