Research Paper Basics

Is Google the Queen of the Internet?

Many college students believe that a website that lands higher in the Google rankings is automatically a better site with more trustworthy material.

Not so.

Google is very secretive about how their algorithms work—they just don't want us to know exactly how they rank things (presumably to keep people from gaming the system to boost their websites' rankings), but we do know a few things.

What will boost a website's position

• Keywords in boldface type or keywords in italic.
• If these keywords get repeated a lot, the search engine likes your site better. It doesn't matter that repeating keywords over and over again every time you mention a thought related to these keywords is poor writing. The machine just worries about how often you say "keywords".
• It helps a lot to have these keywords in your subheads too.
• If you have a lot of links to and from "quality" websites (whatever that means), your ranking goes up, but not too many. If Google thinks your site is a "link farm," you don't win.
• Lots of traffic to your site raises its ranking.
• And of course, you can pay Google.

What will lower (or destroy) a website's ranking

• Any error in HTML coding will probably mean Google simply won't list the site.
• They don't respect "link farms," sites that are simply a lot of links to other stuff. If I put up a site that is "Links to Ten Websites that will Help You Write," it will probably not get indexed.
• As you can see from the above rules, Google is not in love with a site that is just a big block of text that is written with a lot of language variety and style. They love repetition, show, and flash.

A scholarly article that is just several paragraphs of smart, well-informed writing doesn't do too well in Google rankings. Google claims that "quality content" is one of its criteria, but there is no way a machine can sort truth from lies. About all they can do is look for variety of language and sentence length.

A sad example from 2016

This article from the Guardian newspaper discusses a strategy for dealing with a key Nazi agenda item that was Google's top search result: "How to bump Holocaust deniers off Google's top spot? Pay Google."

Things have changed since the article was published. When I typed "Did the Holocaust happen" into the search engine in 2019, I got a lot of links to sites discussing Holocaust denial. Nevertheless, the lesson is still good.

"Stormfront" didn't get to the top of the rankings list because it had the best information. And Carole Cadwalladr didn't manage to bump "Stormfront" from the top spot because she had better information. She just paid Google £24.01.

A better Google

The standard Google search which we all use was made to sell things. If my site for wool hats has a lot of traffic, says "wool hats" frequently, and has a lot of links from people who liked my hats, that's good for business. The definition of a "good" academic website is somewhat different.

Google has attempted to address this with Google Scholar. Give it a try as you search for material. You will find sources with a lot more "meat" there.