For all the tiny violins that could be played about how life is getting harder for SEO practitioners, this marks a fundamental and very unwelcome change in the Web.
Google have decided that it’s more profitable to keep people on its own site than redirecting them elsewhere, a big change in its contract. Before, it was ‘structure your site well and we’ll send you traffic’. Now it’s becoming, ‘structure your site well and we’ll take your content, keeping the traffic for ourselves’.
The long term effects of this are that Google becomes one of the bloated portal sites that it disrupted in the late 90s - and sucks the life out of everything else.
Google have decided that it’s more profitable to keep people on its own site than redirecting them elsewhere, a big change in its contract. Before, it was ‘structure your site well and we’ll send you traffic’. Now it’s becoming, ‘structure your site well and we’ll take your content, keeping the traffic for ourselves’.
The long term effects of this are that Google becomes one of the bloated portal sites that it disrupted in the late 90s - and sucks the life out of everything else.