Scott Rafer’s Blog

Google is starting to lose market share of an esoteric, yet important, sort. For early adopter web sites including the leading tech blogs, Google is becoming a little less powerful as measured by the number of visitors it drives to a web site. If the trend continues and goes mainstream, it’s a big deal. Billions of dollars are spent on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) each year. SEO is a series of practices and tools through which web sites on seek to drive clickthroughs from Google’s organic (i.e. free) search results. According to SEMPO, Google’s advertisers alone spent $1.4 billion on SEO over and above their payments to Google in 2008. Millions of sites that don’t buy AdWord also practice SEO and the entire market for SEO has to be at least twice the SEMPO figure.

When a user clicks on one of Google’s ten blue links, the web address of that particular Google Search Engine Return Page (SERP) is written into the records of the destination site that to which the user clicked through. The same is true of any other link from any other page on the web. Those records are called Referrer Logs. They are the lifeblood of scientific web traffic management and online marketing. For the in-crowd blogs and a number of other leading sites, Search Referrers are dropping as a percent of total referrers in favor of so-called Social Referrers from Twitter, Bit.ly, Facebook, and others.

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