Texas opens inquiry into Google search rankings, page 1

Texas opens inquiry into Google search rankings

news.yahoo.com

Google Inc.'s methods for recommending websites are being reviewed by Texas' attorney general in an investigation spurred by complaints that the company has abused its power as the Internet's dominant search engine.

.....appears to be focused on whether Google is manipulating its search results to stifle competition.
The pecking order of those results can make or break websites because Google's search engine processes about two-thirds of the search requests in the U.S. and handles even more....

(visit the link for the full news article)

Your own website is the same as your own shop. Now google owns their shop and it should be their right to put and prioritize whatever they like into that shop. It is only logic that google would prioritize its own products, and put them into a prime position, behind the shop front window.

It would be funny, if the government starts to regulate and to tell you what you can and can not put into your shop and in which order you have to place it in your shop (or website).

I think the real reason behind this investigation, is that the government is trying to clamp down and control google's huge power as an information/ media tool.

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan

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Google uses several criteria to determine the ranking on their search engine. Some of these criteria are secret , not known and change all the time.

Some criteria are very well known, (search engine optimization), such as:

- Amount of links to your website
- quality of websites linking to your website
- amount of traffic / visitors to your website
- density of keywords in your website and related words to the keyword (for instance keyword hotel new york...related words woudl be accomodation , motel, room, tourists, etc), which match the search term in google
- speed of your hosting server
- quality of website

i always suspected google to prioritize websites, which also do a lot of advertising on google (google ads). This is because the hotel i am working at never did google ads a couple of years ago and was ver bad in search engine ranking. Since we started to do google ads and now in the thousands of US$ per month, our normal search engine rankings also went up hugely.

reply to post by nagabonar

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Google change their Ranking algorithms all the time, It's almost impossible to keep up.

I have one site that is the 4th result worldwide for a simple two word search, but last week it was second and it has also been something like 12th, all without me changing much.

For a while google stopped using keywords at all and just relied on links in / out and actual site content, their bots didn't even read the content and keyword tags, now they have gone back to reading them again I think.

I kind of agree that google's strangle hold should be dealt with as at the moment were in a position where google can arbitrarily ban your site from it's search results (as has happened to me) and your business drops down to more or less 0 especially if your running a business that relies purely on the net for advertising.

reply to post by soontide

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Google lets companies pay so that their business will show up first. It's a service the company offers and to be frank they have every right to do this. They are a private company. Google is a private website.

There is nothing illegal about this no matter how much "you don't like it".

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