Recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was called to testify in front of Congress about potential bias in Google’s algorithms. This isn’t the first time Google has been accused of bias and likely will not be the last time. Google alleges there is no bias, yet many Conservatives argue that Google is biased against them.
With our expert knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) and Ahrefs’ massive amounts of data, we wanted to see if we could identify any bias from Google by looking at data for popular Conservative and Liberal news sites. If you’re not familiar with Ahrefs, we’re one of the top SEO tools with seriously big data about the web.
Methodology
Results
Methodology
Google makes hundreds of tweaks to its ranking algorithms every year. Most of these go unnoticed because they’re small, but every so often, there’s a big ‘core’ update that impacts a large percentage of search results. As Google tells us the dates of these updates, we figured we could look for bias by studying organic traffic to well-known Liberal and Conservative news sites before and after these updates.
For instance, here’s the estimated organic search traffic to Fox News since 2015. Each line represents a Google Core Update:
Google Core Updates overlaid on a traffic graph for Fox News
However, looking at this data for one website doesn’t tell us much, so we did the same and for the top Conservative and Liberal news sites. We pulled these from AllSides Media Bias Ratings (left and right bias ratings). Here is a list of those websites:
Conservative news sites:
New York Post
The Last Refuge
Drudge Report
The Federalist
Orange County Register
The Epoch Times
Washington Times
Christian Broadcasting Network
National Review
Townhall
The Mark Levin Show
The Rush Limbaugh Show
Breitbart
Newsmax
The National Interest
The Gateway Pundit
RedState
PJ Media
Washington Examiner
Fox News
Christian Today
Zero Hedge
The Daily Caller
TheBlaze
The Daily Wire
Liberal news sites:
Vox
U.S. News & World Report
The Washington Post
CNN
Bustle
NBC News
Hollywood Reporter
Los Angeles Times
Yahoo News
Al Jazeera
Rolling Stone
HuffPost
The Verge
The New York Times
ABC News
TIME
CBS Local
The Guardian
Bloomberg
NPR
CBS News
The Atlantic
Politico
Univision
Before we get to the results, I should cover a bit about Ahrefs data. We have hundreds of millions of search terms and large amounts of clickstream data. We use this data to estimate organic traffic by looking at all the different queries people search for, the positions that websites occupy in the search results, and where users click. For the Core Updates, we decided to look at traffic at the start of the Google Core Updates and traffic 14 days later. This is to give Google time to roll out the changes to their different data centers. It also gives us time for our data to reflect the changes.
Our data is normalized in the sense that volumes are averaged over 12 months, so it should account for seasonality mostly, with elections being an exception since they’re not every year. We’re also not going to see newer stories or search topics early on, but we should pick up any popular searches and related clickstream data later.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Results
From 2015 to the present, we see a decline in average traffic for the top news sites in each category during Google Core Update periods.
Conservative total traffic decline: -2.65%
Liberal total traffic decline: -1.78%
These numbers are actually very similar and not statistically significant, considering we’re taking into account the traffic of 50 websites and looking at a period of 6 years. Leading up to the last election in 2016, the impact on both categories was roughly equal. Leading up to the 2020 election, if you look at the results from the previous year or so, you’ll see that the impact was roughly equal for both categories, with the most recent update seeming to be better for Conservative websites.
If we look at the individual data points, both Conservative and Liberal news sites saw positive and negative impacts during every one of these Google Core Updates. Each box plot below represents the top websites in each category, and I’ll reiterate that every single update had winners and losers for both categories. Typically, whether a site wins or loses in a core update is related more to its quality than anything else.