Mail Online may be one of the biggest English language news websites in the world – but it believes “woke” executives at Google systematically downgrade it in search.
Insiders at The Guardian, also a top ten global news site, meanwhile believe the issues the Mail has with visibility on Google are down to shortcomings on the site itself rather than search engine bias.
It is at least common ground that The Guardian does much better on search than Mail Online, with a visibility index of 357 versus 58, according to Sistrix which measures the presence of URLs in Google search results (see a full ranking shared by Sistrix below).
With Google every news website’s most important referrer of traffic, this issue is much more than a row between two ideologically opposed publishers. It is an issue at the heart of claims that Google abuses its position as the monopoly online search engine in the UK and the US.
Press Gazette spoke to both sides and a broad range of independent search engine experts to find out whether the search giant really does have it in for Mail Online…
Ofcom: Algorithms pose risk to plurality
The topic of search engine bias re-emerged recently after Ofcom published all the submissions to its future of media plurality consultation, which heard forthright views on Google from both Mail Online publisher DMG Media and Guardian Media Group.
Ofcom has since agreed that algorithms look likely to pose a risk to media plurality in the UK.
DMG Media told Ofcom that readers...
Read Full Story: https://pressgazette.co.uk/inside-mail-onlines-struggle-to-compete-with-guardian-on-google/
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