Secretely Devilish - Could Google Be Promoting Its Properties By Playing With Search Ranking?

Consider 2 webpages, both deployed on the same website (say http://www.rishabhsingla.com/ ), having similar file names (index1.html and index2.html).

The content of index1.html is as follows

The Web of today gives us for free, much of the content that people used to pay for sometime back. While on one hand we have online videos to watch, we can read regularly updated news, and even have encyclopedic content to consume - all this for free! Even the portals providing a regularly updated view of this content are free.

The Web doesn't provide us with just free "content". It also gives us free services and tools. Users can engage into social networking, send and receive email, enjoy chatting with their buddies - by text or even by voice or video, search for images or photos, look for interesting blog posts, write blogs of their own, and can even use office productivity applications - once again, all this for free!

If all these free goodies were not enough, even the applications used to access the Web are available for free. We have secure and capable Web browsers, and feature-rich toolbars which add useful functionality to these browsers.

Clearly, the Web saves people a lot of money!

The content of index2.html is as follows (not everything is same)

The Web of today gives us for free, much of the content that people used to pay for sometime back. While on one hand we have online videos to watch, we can read regularly updated news, and even have encyclopedic content to consume - all this for free! Even the portals providing a regularly updated view of this content are free.

The Web doesn't provide us with just free "content". It also gives us free services and tools. Users can engage into social networking, send and receive email, enjoy chatting with their buddies - by text or even by voice or video, search for images or photos, look for interesting blog posts, write blogs of their own, and can even use office productivity applications - once again, all this for free!

If all these free goodies were not enough, even the applications used to access the Web are available for free. We have secure and capable Web browsers, and feature-rich toolbars which add useful functionality to these browsers.

Clearly, the Web saves people a lot of money!

You would've noticed by now that everything is same for these 2 webpages, apart from the properties to which they point. index1.html points to various Google properties, while index2.html points to non-Google properties.

Google's PageRank, as much information about it is publicly known, doesn't factor outbound links to calculate the rank of a webpage. But that's publicly available information!

The question I ask is - will the rank of index1.html and index2.html be exactly the same (considering everything about them, except their file names and outbound links, is identical)? I have my share of doubts. It's in Google's interest to promote webpages which point to Google properties, so that visitors to those webpages have a higher chance of coming the Google properties which have been pointed to. And currently there is no way to ensure that Google is not engaging into malpractices. The underlying reason behind my doubt is that Google is both a gateway to the Web (both Google and non-Google properties), as well as a provider of some of what constitutes the Web. It helps Google if it can promote third-party pages pointing to Google properties, without letting anyone feel this.

This post echoes another concern of mine - Google promoting webpages with AdSense deployed on them, over those which either have no contextual advertising system deployed, or have a system deployed from one of Google's rivals. Read about my concern here

P.S. I composed the short essay used as the content of index1.html and index2.html

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