• by Amit Raj , September 12, 2018

It’s not exactly news that President Trump is in the news again attacking someone. However, it seems he now has his sights set on Google.

Trump has taken exception to the fact that when anybody searches the term “Trump news,” they are met with a large number of negative articles.

Trump denounced Google, saying the results were “rigged” against him.

Google has responded with its own statement, saying their results are not biased. Any internet marketing or search expert would have known this from inception.

Clearly, Trump has misinterpreted how Google works.

Google shows results based on an algorithm. It takes into account various factors (hundreds of factors in fact) in order to determine how high up it should appear in the search results.

The algorithm is precisely that — it’s a machine, an artificial intelligence system called RankBrain, and it has no political or personal bias. It takes into account a multitude of complex technical factors and orders them in the results according to those findings.

Most likely, the reason a lot of negative articles appear at the top for “Trump News” is for the following reasons

Most people are writing negative articles about Trump.

Negative stories tend to get the most attention, and are the most popular. Every time Trump does something bad, it will make the news, and it just so happens that most people are hunting for those negative articles and clicking on them. These are the articles which are getting the most engagement.

Therefore, for a machine like Google’s RankBrain, it is interpreting these negative articles as the most contextually relevant pages for “news about Trump.”

Very high authority sites are writing these negative articles.

When you have CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post all writing these articles, the Google Algorithm has no choice but to push them up the rankings.

These are well-established, large media outlets with large websites receiving millions and millions of visitors. All are engaging multiples times a day with the site.

In terms of pure authority and trust, these must hold more weight than say, a relative minnow in the internet who is pro-Trump, like Infowars.

The sheer volume of traffic

While Google does keep the exact inner workings of their algorithm under wraps, a lot of search experts have noticed how much the results are reliant on traffic.

If the majority of people are clicking on and engaging with a particular article, it will be pushed further up the rankings. Even if a positive article about Trump was artificially placed near the top, what percentage of people would want to read it?

Again, a lot of the negative articles are getting a large amount of clicks, people are engaging with the page and sharing them. All of these are factors used by the algorithm, and it rewards those negative articles with higher priority in the rankings.

This is perhaps a lesson to Trump and to any individual or business.

Negative publicity will often times get the most attention. No matter how much you try to shift the attention, the power of the internet and social media means the only way you can oust your negative publicity is with more good publicity!