Back in 2010, Google was getting beaten up in the media for the increasing amount of \u201ccontent farm\u201d clutter in the search results. That negative press was so overwhelming that Google felt it had no choice but to respond:<\/p>\n
[We] hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.<\/p>\n
Soon after that, in February 2011, the\u00a0Google Panda update\u00a0was released, which specifically targeted spammy and low-quality content.<\/p>\n
Why do I bring this up today?\u00a0Because the media has been\u00a0hammering Google for promoting fake news\u00a0for the past year and a half \u2014 a problem so extensive that search industry expert Danny Sullivan has referred to it as \u201cGoogle\u2019s biggest-ever search quality crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Needless to say, these accusations are hurting Google\u2019s image in ways that cut far deeper than content farms. While the problem of rooting out false information is a difficult one, it is one that Google has a great deal of motivation to solve.<\/p>\n
Google has already taken action to combat the issue in response to the negative press, including\u00a0banning publishers\u00a0who were promoting fake news ads, testing new ways for users to report\u00a0offensive\u00a0autocomplete suggestions, adjusting their algorithm to devalue \u201cnon-authoritative information\u201d (such as Holocaust denial sites), and\u00a0adding \u201cfact check\u201d tags\u00a0to search results.<\/p>\n
Of course, the issue of trustworthy search results has been on Google\u2019s radar for years. In 2015, researchers from Google released a paper on\u00a0Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT), a way of evaluating the quality of web pages based on their factual accuracy rather than the number of inbound links.\u00a0If implemented, the Knowledge-Based Trust system would ultimately demote sites that repeatedly publish fake news (although there is a potential for it to go wrong if the incorrect facts become widely circulated).<\/p>\n
Whether the Knowledge-Based Trust method is enough to combat fake news \u2014 or if some version of it has already been implemented without success \u2014 is difficult to say. But, it\u2019s clear that Google is interested in making truthfulness a ranking factor, and they\u2019ve never had a stronger motivation to do so than now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in 2010, Google was getting beaten up in the media for the increasing amount of \u201ccontent farm\u201d clutter in the search results. That negative press was so overwhelming that Google felt it had no choice but to respond: [We] hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,36],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-digital-marketing","category-social-media","tag-seo","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"yoast_head":"\n