Chris Silver Smith says, “If you or your company have seen something that harms your reputation abruptly appear in Google’s search results, you may be wondering how and why something negative could appear so fast, and how it gained against longer-established materials. It’s pretty simple, though: Google’s algorithm likes it better. Let me explain.

First of all, Google has worked very hard to interpret user intent when searches are conducted. It’s not easy to fathom what people may be seeking when they submit a keyword or a keyword phrase.

When someone searches for “pizza,” for instance, Google may assume that most of the time people are seeking local pizza providers, so it provides Map Search results of local pizza restaurants, personalized to the locality of the searcher. But it also provides links to pages from nationwide pizza websites that deliver, as well as lists of top area pizza places, the Wikipedia article for pizza — and more.

Since Google cannot always divine a specific intention when a user submits a search query, it’s evolved to using something of a scattergun approach — it tries to provide a variety of the most likely sorts of things that people are generally seeking when submitting those keywords. When this is the name of a business or a person, Google commonly returns things like the official website of the subject, resumes, directory pages, profiles, business reviews and social media profiles”.

Opinion: Google is biased toward reputation-damaging content

Marketing Land

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