Type in the words "climate change facts" and what first comes up, at least in the early days of May 2011, is the webpage Climate Change Facts, notes a recent article in Yale Climate Forum - a site that it says is rife with misinformation contradicted by broad scientific understanding. Yet the site was ahead of webpages for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, The New York Times, and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the post stated.

The Yale Forum set out to find out why and uncovered, well, the realities of SEO. First some background: The Yale Forum conducted nearly 100 Google searches for terms related to climate change then examined the websites that appeared on the first page of results for each search string, for a total of 980 webpages in all. Fifty-two percent of the 980 sites had content in line with peer-reviewed climate science evidence. Wikipedia pages made up another 5% of the search results and news sites accounted for another 27% of search results. Non-news sites promoting skeptical viewpoints accounted for 11% of search results.

Reasons for the rise of Climate Change Facts could be traced to a huge number of links - some 8,500 versus the EPA's 44. The suspect sites were also well optimized, starting with its actual name. By contrast, it noted, science-oriented and peer-reviewed publications tend not to be search engine optimized and use special vocabulary not commonly searched for.

Is J.C. Penney An Appropriate Comparison?

Google is always on the prowl for underhanded manipulations of search rankings, most famously illustrated by a New York Times article on J.C. Penney's rankings, which were found to be suspect. Although in this case it did not ban J.C. Penney from its search engines - its usual punishment. There was much debate as to why, with its status as display advertisers being one theory. Certainly non profit climate change advocacy groups are unlikely to claim such favor. Then again, it is unclear that they are doing anything but white hat SEO practices - much to the scientific community’s chagrin

http://www.marketingvox.com/gaming-climate-change-search-049315/