Google Will Know When You’re Lying

Google is making a list and checking it twice, and if you’re fudging your facts in your marketing—even if you’re doing it out of incompetence rather than malice—your search engine results are going to suffer.

At least that will be the case if a new algorithm is put into place.

Eight software developers at Google explained how it would work in a paper called Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources.

We extract a plurality of facts from many pages using information extraction techniques. We then jointly estimate the correctness of these facts and the accuracy of the sources using inference in a probabilistic model. Inference is an iterative process, since we believe a source is accurate if its facts are correct, and we believe the facts are correct if they are extracted from an accurate source. We leverage the redundancy of information on the web to break the symmetry. Furthermore, we show how to initialize our estimate of the accuracy of sources based on authoritative information, in order to ensure that this iterative process converges to a good solution.

It only gets more complicated from there, and you won’t fully understand it you’re not a math whiz, but the bottom line is pretty straightforward. Your web site will be scrutinized for the accuracy of its facts and the accuracy of its sources. If you come up short in the honesty department, your search engine rankings are going to crater.

As long as their algorithm works more or less correctly, Google will be doing everybody a favor. Conspiracy theory web sites won’t get as much traction. Nor will the web sites of companies that lie about their products and their competition.

Nor, for that matter, will the web sites of companies that are wrong on the details thanks simply to laziness.

Marketers who phone in their content solely for the sake of search engine optimization will have to up their game if they want to get noticed by Google and therefore potential customers, but they should have been upping their game a long time ago anyway. Customers want accurate and compelling information, not slapped together paragraphs crammed with keywords.
Gossip web sites, the authors say, are currently ranked very high for obvious reasons, but they’re not considered reliable, so they’re going to fall in the search engine rankings. Some less popular sites, on the other hand, are going to rise in the ranks because they’re more accurate.

That’s terrific news for marketers, isn’t it? As long as we do our jobs the way we’re supposed to be doing our jobs, we’ll have another way to get noticed and find potential customers.