I’ve been reading about a couple instances in the last week of people “manipulating” the search results of Google to allow their company’s website or client’s website to get a “better” position. I’ve always found these "controversies” humorous, but does it really matter?
You may think that if a website is visited a lot of times, it automatically gets higher on Google results: this would only be correct for 10% of how Google figures it out. A larger weight is given to a website that has a lot of websites connecting to it.
So, in my example from yesterday, it was discovered (before Google corrected the problem) that, when searching for ‘murder’, the Wikipedia page for Abortion was the second result. This suddenly happened because a lot of websites that discuss ‘murder’ or mention ‘murder’ had linked TO that Abortion page, intentionally trying to make that page rise in the results. Many times something like this is done for political reasons.
It’s not enough that a webpage has a lot of traffic and is about a certain murder. Google thinks that, if other websites that are about murder LINK to a certain site, that site has more credibility on the subject.
So, there are some public relations companies and marketing companies that either make thousands of webpages or hire websites to put links to their clients websites. That way, their client-pages have a LOT more sites linking to them, thus increasing their page views.
This happened last month when JCPenny was punished for hiring people to put their links on random webpages. Google found out and decreased their ranking to number 27 in a lot of MAJOR search categories, i.e. clothes, bags, makeup.
Is this really a big deal? It seems like people complaining about nothing. Think about it this way, when you’re searching for shirts or a specific item of clothing, do you click on the 20th result? Usually you click on one of the first 3 results, if you don’t already recognize the name of a major brand.
A company can make tens of millions of dollars more if their name is just a few results higher. And that is why Google tries to be fair and why your search results are a valued commodity.
