What Really Makes Your Site Show Up First On a Search Engine
Google is known world-wide as having the best search engine in the game, hands down, indisputable. Getting your website to show up on the first page of Google is an significant achievement, but just how does one do this? Theoretically, if a site contains the most relevant and useful information the user needs, then it should be the first on the search results, right? If this was the case, Google would probably be losing significant amounts of money. In the article I posted above, the author goes into detail on many different methods that a website owner may partake in to increase his or her chances of having their website show up first on a search engine, more specifically on Google. Methods ranged from including location services on your website to utilizing mobile compatibility, but, most surprising of all, paying to show up higher on the search engine. Granted it’s not as simple as paying x amount of dollars with the condition that the more you pay the higher you are, the principle remains the same that there are forms in which google can charge you to show up higher on search results. Here’s how.
Google runs a program called AdWords campaign. You are essentially paying to advertise your website. Website owners and Google agree to terms that Google’s search engines will show up at the top of the first pages of search results, under the condition that owners pay a small fee overtime the website is clicked on. This is known as pay-per-click (PPC.)
Personally, I don’t agree with Google’s move on this. I’d like to see the statistics to be certain, but my understanding is that Google already generates such enormous amounts of revenue that it is unnecessary to risk the potential of poor search results in exchange for payment. Instead of the top websites being the best possible options, they might be mediocre options that happen to be paying to show up at the top. As a consumer, this frustrates me because when I use Google, I want the top results to be the ones that Google’s incredibly genius search engine actually recommends, that the one it was bribed into displaying with money. As a student, I also would like to think that most of the academic websites I used to conduct research, write essays, and post blogs (such as this one) wouldn’t be the ones paying for views. So, if I happened to be using Google’s search engine for preliminary research on say, my upcoming philosophy essay, the top results I get might not even be that good of sources.
All in all, I just think that for such a massive leader in various fields of technology, development, and networking to “sell out” like this, on their service that they’re, most well known for, is a bit disappointing.