Does Google Favor Its Own Platforms in Search Visibility? FINIZ conference 2020

Google is the most dominant search engine in the world. Due to its monopoly, it is often targeted by regulators, accused of imposing its services and platforms. The paper aims to determine whether a presence on Google-owned platforms improves the website visibility on the search engine, expressed through the search engine optimisation score. For this purpose, the web presence of eight private universities in Serbia on Google My Business, Google Maps, YouTube and Google Images were analysed with software screening and observation of the search engine result page. The research results confirmed that Google favours its platforms, as universities with a symbiotic presence on all of them recorded the highest search engine optimisation score. Furthermore, Google gives the highest priority to a verified Google My Business account, as it signals the authority of the university web presence. Since Google uses more than 250 factors in website ranking, the findings should be interpreted with caution.