![]() ![]() “Though Google would like to portray itself as a fair and balanced arbiter of facts - a role it has recently tried to strengthen with the launch of a fact checking mechanism - searchers should be aware that ranking algorithms don’t currently incorporate an assessment of political bias or even factual accuracy,” the company warned. ![]() “Our analysis of the algorithmic metrics underpinning those rankings suggests that factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint,” the report found. “For example, we found that search results denoted as demonstrating a left or far left slant received 40% more exposure in the top 3 ranking spots than search results considered to have a right or far right political slant.” “The proportion of results with a left-leaning bias increased for top ranking results, which typically receive the majority of clicks,” the company found. The company’s research turned up no right-leaning sites in the top results for keywords like “minimum wage,” “abortion,” “NAFTA,” “Iraq war,” “campaign finance reform,” “global warming,” “marijuana legalization,” and “TPP.” How Facebook Is Fact-Checking Conservative Sites into Oblivion “Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results.” “Among our key findings were that top search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a ‘Left’ or ‘Far Left’ slant than they were pages from the right,” Can I Rank found. The company studied over 1,200 URLs that ranked highly in Google search results for politically-charged keywords like “gun control,” “abortion,” “TPP,” and Black Lives Matter” and then assessed whether there was a political slant to the articles. “Can I Rank,” an SEO company in San Francisco, also found an anti-conservative bias in Google search results. ![]() Other conservative sites have reported similar drops in traffic. PJ Media’s Google search traffic, for example, dropped precipitously after a May 2017 algorithm change. Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm, and a website’s traffic prospects can rise or fall depending on the changes. Factors such as the relevance of the topic, the design of the website, internal and external links, and the way articles are written and formatted all can affect a site’s Google traffic. In fact, a whole science has developed - called search engine optimization (SEO) - that purports to help sites become more visible in Google search results. Google is secretive about its algorithm, although the company does say that a variety of factors - around 200 of them, according to Google - go into how pages are ranked. ![]()
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