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MATT CUTTS: Today's question comes from Steve K in
Pennsylvania.
Search for a physical product usually ranks Amazon number
one, even though it may not provide the best user
experience.
What is being done to prevent large corporations from
dominating search engine results?
It's an interesting question.
Because I think, in general, not to call anybody out, but I
think Amazon does have a relatively good user
experience in general.
I wouldn't necessarily agree that Amazon always ranks
number one for every physical product.
So typically, when I do a search for a book,
Amazon is up there.
But if there's an official homepage for a book, it often
ranks very well and sometimes number one as well.
The interesting thing is not every book has a homepage.
This is something that still surprises me.
You'll have a very savvy author, they'll have a web
page, but they might not have a landing page, or a page
dedicated to that specific book.
Sometimes it's just a lack of savviness.
But I was looking at a dictionary, Mrs. Byrne's
Dictionary of Unsual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words and
really there was no content about it on the web other than
say Amazon or Goodreads, or there was something with
Google eBooks.
So the best answer is make sure that there is an actual
page for your product.
In general, Google does try to figure out what are the
official homepages.
Whether it be for governments, or universities,
or states, or whatever.
And we try to make sure that we do
return those when possible.
So we are mindful of whenever users do a search and then if
they complain to us.
If they're complaining that they're not finding the
official homepage for product, then that's something that we
do take into consideration.
But in general, we do look at the number of links, we look
at the content of the page, and if one particular website
is able to get a lot of links because a lot of people think
that it's a great site, then in general, usually it should
rank relatively well.
And I don't think that that by itself is
necessarily a problem.