Australian Google and Facebook ruling
Facebook and Google will be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies after the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, instructed the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code of conduct for the digital giants amid a steep decline in advertising brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
Read the article on theguardian.com
Advise news media in advance of algorithm changes
As you can see in the article above, the code drawn up by Australia included:
…advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies.
Now we do have a good idea how Google’s search algorithms work, and they don’t mind telling us a lot of ranking factors right now. They really can tell quality from spam content with advancements in technology and Googlebot itself which means the supposed top secret algorithm doesn’t need to be that top secret anymore since it’s so effective now at keeping bad content out of search rankings. If we take this view of the Google ranking algorithm, is telling news media in advance of algorithm changes a big deal?
To my knowledge it would certainly be the first time that Google notified a specific industry or group about algorithm updates in advance and I wonder what does that look like?
Favouring original source news content
This seems to suggest that simply being an original source news content provider would bump you higher in Google search results. Now, Google might already bump original sources higher, so this might not change anything in how Google displays results, but it also might!
Countries altering organic search results
This is the area I find this really interesting. Google has always prided itself on providing the best search results for users based on their query, using their internal algorithms. If a precedent is set here, of a country internally altering those results, will those search results give the same value to the user? Will bad results be returned? What could this lead to for Google overall?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, tweet me @proximowebs!