The growth of social media has given organisations new ways of engaging with audiences across the internet. However, a website’s core traffic is still derived from search engines, primarily Google (90% global market share). To increase traffic, a website needs to increase its position in search results for its key terms. This position is determined by a number of factors, most importantly by PageRank algorithm (after co-founder Larry Page). PageRank is a logarithmic scale from 1 to 10 that determines how important Google believes a page to be, it is determined by analysing the incoming links to a given website, both their quantity and quality. Bear in mind that very few websites have a PageRank of 10 (USA.gov.uk is one), even google.com and bbc.co.uk only score a 9. The best PageRank’s come from having a lot of incoming links from websites which themselves have lots of incoming links. This gives the research community a good opportunity to compete, as animal rights websites tend to have less incoming links than university and government websites. Check the video below for more information on Google’s search methods.

So let’s have a look at the scores of some animal research and animal rights websites:

UK

US

In the UK we can see that pro-research websites are generally doing better than the anti-vivisection societies. On the other hand, there is a much more level playing field in the US. This could be down to better connections between pro-research organisations and universities, industry and government websites in the UK.

What about the number of incoming links. Although there is no definitive way to measure this, I have used Alexa to compare all of them.

UK

US

A much more concerning picture for research, with websites opposing the use of animals in research receiving more incoming links than pro-research websites by a huge magnitude – around 5x the number in the UK and a whopping 50x the number in the US.

If you wonder why this matters then consider this. Younger generations, who typically use the internet when researching new issues (such as animal testing), are almost twice as likely to support a ban on research than the more senior members of society (Pew Research Centre 2009, Mori Poll 2012). This is, in part, because of the plethora of bright and shiny animal rights websites they come across when investigating this thorny topic.

There are a number of ways that websites can improve their search traffic, often known as “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). This ranges from the White Hat tactics of generating good content that people want to link to (which Google encourages), to Black Hat tactics of spamming keywords and paying for links (which Google actively punishes when it finds it). Older websites, with new content, easy to navigate, with a clear layout, sitemap and up-to-date information is important, but it is all useless without the quality and quantity of incoming links mentioned above.

What can you do?

It is important for all of us to defend animal research, and one of the easiest ways you can do this is to talk to your university or institution about adding a link to Speaking of Research (as well as the other pro-research organisations) to your webpage on the use of animals in research, or a links page. It is not just large institutional links which are important. If you are a blogger, tweeter, forum-user, new article commenter, then please try to include a link to our website – it could really make a difference in our ability to provide students of today with the information they need.

Speaking of Research