Google fights fake news within it's search results.

Google fights fake news within it's search results.

Google is fighting fake news due to the recent elections and all the pop up websites posting misleading content. Google is fighting these fake news websites because they could have actually altered the presidential elections recently and put Trump in office when he wasn't suppose to be. Sure, he had the electoral votes and all, but would he have had won if it weren't for these fake news websites posting whatever they wanted just to gain traffic?

We all know that controversial content will draw a big crowd, and posting about the election will definitely pull people in since they're passionate about it. These fake news websites always get more active around election time because it only comes around once every four years and if they're not capitalizing on the search results then they just aren't doing their jobs. The controversial content doesn't even matter as long as you can get a good discussion going on the pages. A lot of these fake news websites get indexed pretty quickly and it makes sense that they would pop up quick and stay on top due to all the shares and linking people are naturally doing to these posts.

Google is now removing, or pushing down, low quality content with the help of the users. You can jump into a Google search and report inappropriate or inaccurate suggestions by clicking "Report Inappropriate Suggestions" just under the suggested search box when typing in the address bar of Google. This will help weed out the searches that don't make sense or are just rubbish in the eyes of the people. Now I'm sure this will get abused when it comes to reporting competition, but I'm also sure that if Google rolled out this update they have tested it thoroughly (hopefully).


A quote from Ben Gomes, VP of Engineering at Google

We combine hundreds of signals to determine which results we show for a given query—from the freshness of the content, to the number of times your search queries appear on the page. We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content, so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we saw back in December are less likely to appear.

This comes right from the VP of Engineering so we know they're working on it pretty diligently. We're all human though and mistakes can happen. Could this new algorithm change open a can of worms when it comes to our own rankings and unique content? It's quite possible since a lot of us don't have these big authoritative websites that we post on. If you're a blogger will this affect how your content is indexed or do you think you're safe from the new algorithm update since you've been posting quality content over the years?

Since this update is just rolling out it's pretty unclear on how it's going to affect our current rankings. We can assume that starting up a news website anytime soon is probably a bad idea since your content will be under scrutiny due to the new update. You can probably start up a news website in hopes to rank higher in a year or so, but I wouldn't put all my eggs in that basket.

Later on Gomes went on to state that roughly 0.25% of searches returned with misleading or hate filled content which is not what people were searching for when they came to Google. With the 5.5billion searches performed each day on Google that means roughly 13.75million of these searches returned false news and misleading content to the users. Do you think that 13.75 million searches a day can sway an election... It most certainly can! And this is the main reason that Google is fighting against false information spread by low authority websites aka fake news websites. There are plenty of credible websites out there that spread correct information, but sometimes that's not what people want to hear. These people will find the fake news websites and share away. How many times have you been on facebook and seen the shares of obviously fake news, but it's treated as if it's correct because it's from a news related website... All the damn time.

1. What are your thoughts on this new algorithm update?
2. Do you think it will affect our current rankings even if we're not in the News niche?
3. If you have a news website, have you noticed any drastic ranking changes?

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Razzy