A week or so ago I found out about Google’s +1 program, which allows anybody to uprate websites that participate, so that users can boost that site’s search rankings.
As has been found recently, Google has staff of people who actively downrate websites based on a number of factors, one of which is according to reports, to downgrade sites that don’t agree with the “consensus” about AGW, or which allow for a diversity of views on the topic.
Because of this, WUWT’s google search rankings have become so repressed that you simply can’t find us when searching on terms like “global warming” or “climate change”. See below how search traffic has dropped as Google made changes:
I am hoping that with active reader involvement in the +1 program, we can reverse this trend.
All you have to do is press the “+1” button at the bottom of any article you like (its down there with all the other ‘share’ buttons like twitter and facebook, etc.). Thanks for helping!
UDAPTE: 11/07/2011 345PM PST Some commenters suggest we aren’t being properly skeptical and have no basis for our concern. We do have a reference, this internal Google document:
http://www.chaddo.com/GoogleRatingGuidelines.pdf
and this analysis:
-Anthony
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I tried to join so I could vote but apparently “William Mason” is an unacceptable name to use. It says it violates their naming policy. Really!? Really? I smell funny business. Then when I want to complain it wants the home link to the profile that they won’t let me make. How neat as that. Wish I could help but……
Cheers,
William Mason
C3 Editor says: November 8, 2011 at 4:47 am
(re SEOQuake, an add-on for testing WUWT for keywords for Search Engine Optimization… there might be a quite innocent reason for WUWT’s status lagging SkSci.)
Moderators, have you paid attention to this post?
REPLY: Doesn’t matter. WordPress.com not private server -A
Lucy, the problem isn’t search results for “WUWT” or “Watts Up”, because people that know about us can already find us. The problem is for people searching for information on “global warming” or “climate change” or other such terms, our site shows up so low that it might as well not be ranked.
As for Mr. CE, a commenter who claimed to be employed by Google and decried our “conspiracy theories”: I emailed you more than a day ago to discuss this issue with you, but you haven’t responded, however I find it odd that you claim to be a Google employee but are using a Yahoo email address…. Please respond to my email if you are who you say you are and wish to discuss this topic… We would love to learn more about why our site seems to be so badly downrated… thanks…
Mike Lorrey says: November 8, 2011 at 11:01 pm “Lucy, the problem isn’t search results for “WUWT” or “Watts Up”, because people that know about us can already find us. The problem is for people searching for information on “global warming” or “climate change” or other such terms, our site shows up so low that it might as well not be ranked.”
But as yet nobody has given a substantial reason why it should be ranked higher. For somebody looking for general information about global warming WUWT isn’t a great starting place. Roy Spencer’s blog, for example, at least has some broad introductory sections on global warming as well as introductions to his alternative view. WUWT posts require some familiarity with on-going issues. For somebody looking for a general introduction RealClimate, Lucia’s Blackboard or ClimateAudit or Science-of-Doom are awful places to start – not because of any particular fault with those sites but because you already need to know a lot to follow the discussions.
NyqOnly,
WUWT is highly regarded by many, for its surfacestations.org project, for exposing climategate, among quite a number of other things, beyond it being the very highest traffic climate blog, and ranked number 1 science blog by a number of organizations for several years. So your claims are rather specious. If it wasn’t for WUWT, BEST would never even have happened.
Mike Lorrey says: November 9, 2011 at 4:20 am
“WUWT is highly regarded by many, for its surfacestations.org project, for exposing climategate, among quite a number of other things, beyond it being the very highest traffic climate blog, and ranked number 1 science blog by a number of organizations for several years.”
And?
Being highly regarded or even having some influence on major events doesn’t mean a site should have a high ranking. The attitude through these comments seems to be one of WUWT somehow deserving a high ranking simply because the poster thinks the site is spiffy.
As for “Climategate” WUWT crops up FOURTH on a Google search of that term. Far from being vanished by an evil Google coproration, WUWT is right there in the first few links that anybody sees (it gets beaten by Wikipedia, the Daily Telegraph and the Climategate.com site). For a conspiracy to supress WUWT you’d have thought Google would be wanting WUWT to be particulalry hidden when it comes to Climategate! In reality it actually ends up ranked higher than the Guardian, Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post.
Traffic? Think about it – traffic isn’t going to be a great basis for ranking web searches. Facebook gets a lot of traffic (vast amounts) but for many search terms Facebook is irrelevant or weak. And not if you want traffic to be the metric then you are saying WUWT should be ranked LOWER than i currently is on the search term “Climategate”.
Thinking about it WUWT high ranking for “climategate” explains much of the decline cited above. When search traffic on climategate was high, WUWT would have got many paper visiting via a Google search. As that traffic has declined so fewer people have found WUWT.
Going back to the Alexa graph provided in the main article. You will note to major drop-offs in traffic coming from searches to WUWT. There is a high in late 2009 which then declines into early 2010. There is then a slow increase reaching a moderate peak in mid 2010. After that there is another sharp decline.
How does that compare with “Climategate”. Late 2009 the story breaks (and hence WUWT gets lots of hits, as the site is a major source on the issue and many other sites link to WUWT on the issue). After the initial excitment the traffic dies down a bit but as various inquiries get under way interest remains. Mid 2010 various inquiries start reporting back on their invetsigations – the inquiries largely through cold water on the scandal (or, if you prefer, whitewash it). More or less around that time WUWT gets the other sharp drop in the Alexa graph.
So rather than Google supressing WUWT the actual issue has been Google PROMOTING WUWT as a top link on the issue of “climategate”. As this search term was a major source of traffic to WUWT, as interest in the topic has declined so has search-engine referals to WUWT.
OK, one and all, explain why I am wrong 🙂
A bit belated, but everyone should check out Bing. It’s got better and better over time and now I always use it in preference to Google.
If creating a useful search engine weren’t such an enormous and expensive undertaking, I’d start one myself! I have caught Google in at least some very slight/subtle political biases. I remember after Obama’s election, there was a link to interact with the White House – I think for suggestions/discussion. I can’t imagine them being so eager to to help (and for Google to alter their trademark barebones search homepage) if a Republican or Libertarian had just been elected president. I can imagine Google subtlely biasing against political camps by determining the language/attitude, authoritativeness or “truthfulness” of various genres of websites. Might they downgrade non-leftist-cult sites as “hate sites” in the future (behind the scenes, in their black box)?
NyqOnly,
The answer is that Google insiders are able to downrate a site on specific search terms. This is to prevent spam sites from using popular search terms that are irrelevant to their sites from ranking highly. No sane person can dispute that “global warming” isn’t highly relevant to WUWT, ergo, it is clearly being gamed by insiders.
Mike Lorrey says: November 10, 2011 at 1:40 am
“No sane person can dispute that “global warming” isn’t highly relevant to WUWT, ergo, it is clearly being gamed by insiders.”
And? ‘global warming’ is highly relevant to many, many websites. The question is why WUWT should appear HIGHER in those ranking compared with other websites ALSO about global warming.
Secondly there ZERO evidence that WUWT has ranked lower on search terms such as ‘global warming’ than it has in the past.
Thirdly WUWT ranks very highly on other search terms – notably ‘climategate’. If Google was actively trying to supress WUWT then it would make far more sense for them to target a search term like ‘climategate’.
Fourthly the high ranking of WUWT on ‘climategate’ wholly explains the Alexa stats quoted above. The referals from search engines show big drops around the same time as big drops on searches generally, on ‘climategate’
Fifthly a quick examination of WUWT shows several design issues which means it is likely to be ranked highly on ‘climategate’ but not highly on ‘global warming’ or ‘cliamte change’. Look at the site navigation bar below the masthead: “Climategate” is featured and will refer you to a special page – ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ aren’t. Looks more like WUWT is being down ranked by robots! Rather than make some fairly easy site improvements we’ve got a bizarre conspiracy/persecution fantasy.
Sixthly on broad terms like ‘climate change’ OBVIOUSLY major websites like government agencies, major news organisations and Wikipedia are going to dominate the hits. As I explained earlier if Google was just sticking with the basic pagerank algorithm we’d still expect to see WUWT low. WUWT position is consistent with where we would expect it to be if its rank was untouched by human hands. A behemoth like the World Health Organisation doesn’t appear until page 6 on a google search of ‘climate change’ for example.
Seventhly things like web awards or popularity are being cited as reasons why WUWT should have a higher ranking – but neither of those are typical factors in a search engine ranking. Yet even if we do take that into account does anybody actually think this site is bigger than NASA or even the Financial Times? On generic search temrs like ‘climate change’ WUWT is a small fish in a very big pond and is competing for attention not just with other climate blogs (eg Real Climate or Climate Audit) but with EVERY NEW ORGANISATION ON THE WEB.
8thly lots of blogs around the issue of global warming. Try ‘global warming’ as a search term (no quotes). When the results page comes up go to the sidebar and pick ‘blogs’ rather than ‘Everything’. Top hit? Roy Spencer’s blog. First page is actually dominated by blogs that challenge the ‘consensus’ position. Yeah WUWT could be higher but that just demonstrates point 5 above – WUWT could be higher relative to other ‘skeptical’ blogs. Makes no sense to assume that Google is busy down rating WUWT but not Roy Spencer, Climate Depot or Minnesotan’s for Global Warming.
In short 1. no evidence that WUWT has been down ranked on search terms like ‘global warming” 2. its ranking is consistent with what we know about page ranks and this site’s design 3. any decline in referals is wholly explained by a decline in searches on ‘climategate’
Sorry – meant to say “WUWT is a small fish in a very big pond and is competing for attention not just with other climate blogs (eg Real Climate or Climate Audit) but with EVERY NEWS ORGANISATION ON THE WEB.” not “NEW ORGANISATION”