Google’s been under intense pressure to alter its results after it was found a week ago to be listing a Holocaust-denial site first for a search on “Did the Holocaust happen.” Now, that’s finally changing.
It’s not clear whether this is due to a change with Google in terms of its ranking algorithms or by the efforts of external parties to influence the results. My bet is on the latter. Google has previously said that it wanted to address this and similarly egregious results but that the process would take time.
On iPad, denial site bumped from first place
Currently, when searching on my iPad, I see that a page from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has moved to the top free listing, knocking a denial discussion forum page that had been there into second place.
I was not logged into Google, using incognito mode within Chrome, so my personal search history shouldn’t have been influencing this result.
On desktop, denial site remains tops but likely to change
On desktop, the older results (also in incognito mode) are still showing for me, as is the case with mobile results on my iPhone:
I suspect we’ll see what’s happening for me on the iPad begin to spread to other devices and for more people. It can often take time for ranking changes to move across the whole of Google, because of the many data centers it is using. But I’m not alone in seeing them:
New sites seek to alter results
Also as part of the change, a new site called Did The Holocaust Happen that was specifically designed to get into the rankings and take on the denial sites is showing up, appearing in position seven:
Another site I learned about tonight hasn’t yet seemed to have gained ground into the listings.
Why the change?
As I said, I doubt this is a deliberate change by Google. In particular, the denial site remains in the listings, which is a sign it hasn’t been penalized. That would have been problematic for Google, because it really doesn’t have a good policy to pull sites for this type of reason.
And if that sounds crazy, I strongly encourage you to read my story from last week on this topic. Google pulling sites for not being able to prove things could lead to it having to do stuff like banning religious sites. It needs a comprehensive, defendable policy. It also needs time to develop an algorithm that can better cope with the amount of “post-truth” content that’s been developing.
So if Google didn’t make the change, what’s happening? The work of external parties, almost certainly.
For one, as people have reported on this story, starting with the Guardian that first wrote about it and followed by others, those news stories have gained ground. That’s natural for both Google and Bing. Fresh content, especially from news sites, is often rewarded on a short term basis.
The writer for the Guardian who has been tracking this issue also did a follow-up story about buying an ad against these results, to jump above the denial site through paid listings. However, she’s not the only one. The aforementioned US Holocaust Memorial Museum has also either been buying ads or someone buying them for the museum, as you can see in my first example above.
That ad is almost certainly NOT causing its free listing to rank better. Google strongly denies that ads influence rankings this way, nor has there ever been any serious evidence that it has an impact.
However, having the ad there could be causing more people to realize that the museum should be listed first and begin linking to it. A rise or links, especially from authority sites and with the right type of textual context, could have an impact. The right links, the right way, can effectively act like votes to improve ranking.
As for that new site that’s appearing, it’s was built by an SEO — someone who knows search engine optimization — specifically to do well for this search. It’s like hiring a PR firm to deal with bad publicity. PR people know how to push for good press. SEOs know how to push for good search results.
That SEO was John Doherty, who’s well followed by other SEOs on Twitter, who likely found ways to push links and promote the site for the good cause. Remember that the next time you hear that SEOs are all scum-sucking evil doers.
Doherty and SEOs in general have no secret powers. They can’t guarantee a favorable change in rankings, any more than a PR person can promise a good story in the press. But they have great knowledge that can improve the odds, and that’s what I think is happening here.
The challenge of the infrequent search
It’s also easier to happen because frankly, this isn’t a popular search. Very few people do it. The Guardian reporter who started running those ads, tapping into Google’s own data, found it happened about 10,000 times per month — or about 300 times per day. Google handles 5.5 billion searches per day. In short, this search practically never happens.
Since it doesn’t happen that often, it’s easier to impact the results. In fact, one of the reasons the denial site has probably ranked well and for so long is because practically no one who would be concerned about this happening has done the search to even notice — nor notice to the degree of creating content to combat it.
Why does Bing get it right & Google get it wrong?
Of course, it is weird, disappointing and disheartening that on this search, Google wasn’t getting one of the good, authoritative anti-denial sites that were listed second and third into the top position. That’s especially so oft-maligned when Bing managed to do it and still does, showing Wikipedia’s “Holocaust denial” page first among the non-news web listings:
As my story last week explained, there’s some speculation that Google’s results are different because it’s rewarding clickthrough behavior more heavily. IE, if people who do this search click a lot on a particular site, that could move it higher IF Google operated that way.
If more people who do this search are already in a Holocaust denial frame of mind, then they might favor a denial site and that might move it higher.
The problem with this theory is that Google has been steadfast in saying that clickthrough does not directly impact its rankings like this. But, it could be that some of the clickthrough behavior is being indirectly mined by Google’s machine learning RankBrain system in a way that is causing these results and others to move some sites higher than its old system that more heavily weighted links.
That can cause some people to wonder why Google might not shutdown RankBrain or shift back to links. But links have their own problems and can be gamed, to the degree that some exploits even became known as Google bombs.
NOTE: This story is developing, and when I’m done updating, this line will disappear.
The post Google’s results no longer in denial over “Did the Holocaust happen?” appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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