🔍 Australian regulators demand that Google disclose algorithm updates to news publishers in advance

Aug 21, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, we've got some insight into how Bing uses engagement metrics, and, if Australia's regulators have their way, we may be in for Google algorithm update leaks as well.

Over the years, Google has engaged in several back-and-forth battles with news publishers, which have complained that the search engine is bleeding them of ad revenue and hurting their subscriptions. More recently, however, the company has sought to become a better partner to publishers, launching the Google News Initiative in 2018 and announcing in June a news licensing program to pay publishers for content that would appear in an upcoming news experience launching later this year.

But, aggressive government intervention in Australia threatens Google's voluntary news licensing strategy: The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) released a "News Media Bargaining Code" that would impose stringent rules on Google' (and Facebook's) dealings with publishers. Among other things, the code requires Google to give advance notice (by nearly a month) of significant algorithm changes to enable publishers to adapt, putting them in a privileged position. "If Google is compelled to formally notify publishers of algorithm changes in advance, that information would undoubtedly leak publicly and globally," writes Contributing Editor Greg Sterling, "And while some SEOs would welcome that, it could have larger, unintended consequences for the search ecosystem."

Now, Google doesn't use engagement signals for ranking, claiming that they're easily spammed — but Bing does: "We do believe that this is useful data that is helping us to help [users] retrieve the best content," Fabrice Canal, principal program manager at Bing, said during our Bing Webmaster Guidelines session of Live with Search Engine Land. To prevent people from manipulating those signals, Bing looks at them with respect to other engagement metrics and search intent; and, because machine learning, which powers the rankings, is constantly evolving, the weight of a factor can change day-to-day, helping to weed out bogus engagement signals. For even more insights into how Bing crawls, indexes and ranks pages, and handles search spam, watch the entire session here.

George Nguyen,
Editor

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