Reasons Why People Are Leaving Your Website

You’ve written some really compelling copy for your website. Your product images are polished. Your overall site design is professional. And thanks to marketing initiatives like these ones, you’re getting traffic to your site. So why is it that so few of those visitors are converting into leads and customers? I hear about issues like

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Facebook Is Not Enough For Your Business

One of the largest sites in the world Facebook has exploded from becoming a site primarily used by College kids to a world wide phenomenon. In Canada, and what I see in Grande Prairie, is a trend for small businesses and start-ups to choose a Facebook page over a website to promote their services and

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5 Strategies To Get Started With SEO

SEO is easy to pick up, but very difficult to master. Anyone who spends a few hours learning the fundamental pillars of SEO can get a relatively firm grasp on the basics — including keeping your site updated, harnessing the power of great content, building external links, and getting involved on social media. Each of

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It’s time for some major players to be Responsive

Last week I reported on an upcoming change to the Google change that was going to see increased ranking benefits to those who are mobile friendly. It’s a big change but a needed one as today more then ever we are using mobile devices to browse the internet. 2015 is the first year on record

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Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google's rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links.

THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free "news" stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.

Google's search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. "A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

There are already lots of apps that try to help internet users unearth the truth. LazyTruth is a browser extension that skims inboxes to weed out the fake or hoax emails that do the rounds. Emergent, a project from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, New York, pulls in rumours from trashy sites, then verifies or rebuts them by cross-referencing to other sources.

LazyTruth developer Matt Stempeck, now the director of civic media at Microsoft New York, wants to develop software that exports the knowledge found in fact-checking services such as Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org so that everyone has easy access to them. 

He says tools like LazyTruth are useful online, but challenging the erroneous beliefs underpinning that information is harder. "How do you correct people's misconceptions? People get very defensive," Stempeck says. "If they're searching for the answer on Google they might be in a much more receptive state."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Nothing but the truth"

Read More: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html#.VRSLgUZBrN4

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