This article is reprinted from Bill Dembski, design theorist William Dembski’s Substack, with his permission.

Right now, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230) grants online platforms like Google and Facebook legal immunity for user-generated content, ensuring they are not considered publishers or speakers and therefore cannot be held liable for what users post, even if the content is false, defamatory, or otherwise problematic. Additionally, this law allows platforms to moderate, filter, or remove content they find objectionable without losing their immunity. Moreover, for copyright issues, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (17 U.S.C. § 512) provides a separate legal framework, offering platforms safe harbor protection against copyright infringement claims as long as they comply with takedown requests from copyright holders. Together, Section 230 and the DMCA enable platforms to avoid direct legal exposure for third-party content, allowing them to host, curate, and distribute vast amounts of information without assuming liability.

Google’s current legal advantage

But consider, suppose you do a Google search for images about some topic. You’ll see Google re-presenting image after image. Sure, you can click on an image that interests you and from there click on a link that will take you to the site where the image originally appeared. But often when I’m searching for images, it’s enough for me to see what Google re-presents. I suspect that’s the case for many Google users. Yet for some of those images, if they appeared on individual websites, not only could the owners of the images request that the image be taken down but they could also claim copyright violations and seek damages.

Image Credit: Roman Motizov - Adobe Stock

On my websites, I must — as a matter of survival — be scrupulous about making sure that we have the rights for any images we use. Otherwise, legal exposure from copyright violations could destroy my business. Sometimes, despite our best efforts at scrupulosity, an image slips through the cracks (perhaps a new employee hasn’t been properly trained about only uploading images for which we have proper usage rights). It doesn’t matter if the image is only up on our site for a day. There’s a law firm in Switzerland that trolls the internet in real time for copyright violations.

I’ve had this firm come after me for images to which we didn’t have the rights. It cost me about $700 an image to get them off my back. What if Google was hit with copyright damages for every Getty image that it re-presented? Why does Google get away with such copyright violations but little guys like me don’t? Google has effective lobbyists and has, to date, been able to make the laws work in their favor—such as through Section 230 and the DMCA. But that can change.

Okay, after all the ways that Google inserts itself into your searches—after all the stuff Google shows in response to your search query, stuff that in one form or another is advertising and contributes to its bottom line—you finally get to the organic results. The organic results are the search results that Google delivers on the merits of the webpage in question and the authority of the website hosting the page—at least that’s Google’s official story. In fact, how Google assesses the merit of webpages is itself biased and often in service of, if not its bottom line, then broader of political and ideological aims (more on this later).

Once you finally wade through the Google ads… yet more ads

Even with organic results, once you finally wade through the Google ads to reach them (sometimes you have to scroll “below the fold”), you can still find Google inserting itself with further ads and commentary. For the search on “best online colleges,” Google lists four sponsored items before listing the organic results. Interspersed among the organic results is another ad. And after all the organic results on the first search engine results page, Google includes three more sponsored items. These are ads, and collectively clicking on all of those delivered in response to the “best online colleges” query would yield Google several hundred dollars.

Image Credit: Teerasan - Adobe Stock

SEO content sites make more money when people (objectified as “users”) search on a keyword likely to signify high intent (as with people searching on a keyword that combines “mesothelioma” and “lawyer” probably want to sue somebody for giving them this cancer). Low intent is unrewarding, high intent is lucrative. For an example of low intent, consider users that search on the keyword “good careers.” They are most likely still trying to figure out what to do with their lives and thus unlikely to enroll in a course of study or take some action that requires an investment in capital and time. They’re just collecting information and unlikely to act on it. But users that search on the keyword “best online mba programs” are likely thinking of applying to and enrolling in such an online program. Simply by searching on such a keyword, they are likely to have high intent.

The money is in high intent. Users searching on “best online mba programs” will quickly find themselves taken to an article that purports to rank the best online MBAs. Ranking lists are especially good in eliciting high-intent traffic (idle curiosity aside, why ask about what are the best schools in a niche unless you’re thinking of attending one?). Landing on such an article, users are then likely to click on some call to action in which they request information about a particular online MBA program. Such a request then constitutes a lead. These leads can be lucrative. I have a colleague who generates such leads for a big online university and receives $175 per lead. A lead doesn’t guarantee enrollment, but it raises the probability of enrollment. Some years back, schools wanted to see about 2 percent of leads issue in enrollments. At $175 per lead, that would mean the school is paying close to $9,000 per enrollment.

Getting to first is the name of the game

Some years back, I ended up selling one of these educational websites for what to me was a hefty sum. As it is, I knew the academic world well and was able with the help of a solid team to write articles that very quickly shot up high with the search engines on lucrative high-intent keywords. The holy grail in the online educational space was being in the first position on the first SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for the keyword “best online colleges,” the most lucrative keyword in the business at the time (hence the previous exercise searching on this term). For a year or so we had the very top position and for several years we were in contention for it.

Licensed via Adobe Stock

The place you most want to be is in the first position on the first SERP. People doing searches are most likely to click on that position first, the second position with less frequency, and so on. A decade ago, if you didn’t make it to the first SERP, the top of the second SERP still wasn’t too bad, though the drop off in traffic to your site in that case was significant. Currently, with all the stuff that Google puts in the way of organic results for lucrative keywords, unless you are in the first few positions of the first SERP, you’re probably wasting your time trying to make money off organic search. By the way, Google currently lists USNews at the number one spot for the keyword “best online colleges.”

Next: Becoming a slave to Google: How it happens

Here are the previous instalments: The evilization of Google—and what to do about it Part 1: Understanding Google’s dominance over the internet. Nothing is totally evil. Still, there’s enough evil in Google that it is, for now, more on the side of Darth Vader than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

and

The utter dependence of online businesses on Google. Part 2: An SEO business needs to please Google or else it is dead in the water. Google’s re-presentation of information created by others makes it less likely that users will visit them. Thus Google’s business expands at their expense.