By Obfuscating the True Path People Take to Discover Your Site, Google Gets Far More of the Credit than They Deserve

In this post by Rand Fishkin, he talks about how Google, Facebook and other platforms profits by obfuscating the true path people take to discover your site and hogging the credit for traffic.

You’re listening to a podcast. The guest describes a product that sounds compelling, alluring, something you’ve been looking for… What happens next? You search Google.

Next month, the marketing team for that product analyzes where their traffic’s coming from, and see that, *TA DA*, visitors from Google search were the top-performing cohort. That podcast you heard about them on? It’s nowhere.

So, the marketing team takes their findings to the executive team, who determine that… surprise surprise… marketing should spend more money and effort on Google, and stop fiddling around with those silly podcasts. After all, Google sent all that high-conversion traffic, right?

Go check out the full post, it’s a good read.