So the Australian law makers want to make Google pay for news it shows and lists on it’s platform. This is something Google refuses to do and has threatened to leave all together, so what an Australia be with Google?

It is a worldwide challenge to the newspapers and those offering information via print. Online has taken over and what you would pay for is often delivered free of charge via search engines like Google. As these search engines are not news agencies in themselves and just print the information from these sources, Australia has decided this is unfair and news agencies should be compensated.

It is not clear whether this affects all listings or only the articles Google shows on its own platform, without clicking into the website in question.

Google Reported Earnings Australia

It is estimated that Google earns a A$3.7 billion (Aus Dollars) revenue form Australia, but argues that only delivers A$134m in profit, not enough to make this agreement profitable.

Of course this is questionable as we are never quiet sure where the costs can be attributed to. The UK has argued for some time, that the profits reported for tax are nowhere near the actual profit made via the advertising in the UK.

What Would Happen If Google Disappeared?

The answer is there are other search engines, most of us use Google by habit and forgotten the rest exist.

• Yahoo
• Bing
• DuckDuckGo

And lets not forget that we often search using our social media platforms. Which raises another question, what happens when you share a news piece from a new website? Should that social media platform pay for that news or you? Or should news platforms, prevent their material being shared.

But whether these will also face the same law is still not clear and even these may choose not to operate in Australia, or not show news listings.

This would be like a an example law trial, that sets out law for the next century or so. Can people really live their lives if google no longer existed?

Of course Australian businesses where a lot of their income lies in online sales will be affected and that is where Google may hold the trump card. But there is also a claw back, how many local businesses are suffering from online sales by bigger companies, especially those from abroad.

Anyone who relies exclusively on their income via Google is taking a huge gamble anyway.

My own opinion is, we would still get on with our live, but use other platforms or access the USA or UK google using VPN’s

But back in the real world, some sort of compromise will be made and Google will win again.

So It is the start of a new year and hopefully a better one, for many bricks and mortar businesses. But 2020 has shown that those with a strong online presence have survived better than most. In fact some companies have done record sales online as more people on furlough and lock down, choose to or are forced buy online.

So the question being asked most on podcasts and social media, is what changes will there be in 2021 in regard to search engine optimisation. Of course this has been magnified after the December 2020 Google update.

My Answer Is, Well “Not Much”!

I had no movers through the December update except one, that dropped ranking for 3 days then recovered stronger than before. What was interesting about this search term, is that there are very few links going to the website and none, going to the page that dropped.

There is no science to my opinion, but I believe the December update was to do with content, the knob being turned to better quality. This particular example already performed higher than those around, when compare to link power. So a further improvement in this area, backs up my opinion.

Content and Engagement Still The Factors

Going forward into 2021 I see nothing on the horizon that would change my opinion that content and engagement are the factors I will be working on. Of course link power is still very important, but my strategy will be to create the best site I can without links first and see where it stands against the competition, then work on back links last.

Of course my weakness is this site. Every minute I work on money making project, is a minute not dedicated to my own profile. I refuse to let anyone else write the content to my own site, but of course many others do not see this as a clever strategy.

Create The Opportunities

The lock downs are creating opportunities for many webmasters in terms of time. As many sit at home, why waste this time, get on that computer and start writing and analysing the competition, learn the skills you are possibly lacking.

As I write this, I have been re-visiting the power of SurferSeo and deciding if it is better than a Ahrefs.

I am also experimenting with pages one click form homepage and how that dynamic changes when a page is converted to subdirectory (by adding another page 2 clicks in). This is from something I noticed when adding a page of content to a site 2 clicks in, it looks like Google uses the subdirectory content as a priority and lowers the “related value” of other pages outside of that subdirectory.

This is just a gut feeling at moment, I need to show this by experiments and testing.