SEO Myths of 2018 Busted

If you\’re just getting into SEO it can be extremely overwhelming to understand all of the moving parts. There are lots of common misconceptions and myths that are thrown around with confidence. This is a direct by-product of the nature of SEO which is analyzing, testing, and implementing to fill in the incomplete information gaps. Google doesn\’t tell us everything and most SEO experts are left trying to figure it out on their own.

The best way to do that is to read up and follow thought leaders such as Rand Fishkin. You most likely know who Rand is and understand the massive impact he\’s had on search engine optimization in general.

He recently left Moz and started a new company called \”Sparktoro\” which is a software that helps marketers learn about their audience. He just released a blog called

\”2018 Search Market Share: Myths vs. Realities of Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, DuckDuckGo, & More\”

which addresses some of the misinformation in the SEO world. I suggest you read it but if you don\’t have time here are some quick nuggets from the original article.

The Google Monopoly

Everyone knows that Google is extremely dominant and has essentially found a way to have everyone interact with the world through their search engine. How dominant is Google?

Most people thought that 65% of searches happened on Google but that number is actually 90% of all searches!

Amazon and Facebook are gunning for Google!

There is a lot of hype surrounding how Amazon and Facebook are eating into Google searches. You can see this when you compare searches on Amazon to searches in Google search. For example, on Google \”Halloween Costumes For Women\” has around 135,000 searches for the month of October. On Amazon, that search volume is closer to 1.6 million!

But is that really hurting Google?

Google still has around 50x the searches that Amazon does!

Youtube – The worlds 2nd largest search engine?

Most people have accepted that YouTube is the worlds second largest search engine but that\’s just not true!

The 2nd largest search engine is actually Google Image Search increasing the importance of properly tagging the photos on your website.

The above are just a few quick hits from the original article. It\’s great to see Rand starting a new company and taking a fresh approach to SEO. He\’s always been a trailblazer and is someone I always look to for guidance on how to optimize websites.