Hello everyone! I am a legal assistant currently working on a lawsuit where the dispute between the two parties boils down to an IT issue. Given that I am not an IT professional, I am having trouble understanding some things, and I was hoping that someone who is more knowledgeable can offer some input.

My question is regarding open databases, in particular corporate registries, and whether search engines rank records held on these databases using the same rules that apply to normal websites.

For example, when you Google the name of a company registered in Canada, the first result you get is the record for this company held by the Canadian corporate registry (for example “3796825 CANADA INC.” – just a random company to illustrate my point). There are millions of registered companies and each one has a page like this, and they are all accessible through the website of the corporate registry. However, I assume that an individual company’s record does not count as a separate website.

So how would Google rank this particular search result against normal websites?

If anyone could offer an opinion on this, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

John

Welcome to the forums

2 hours ago, John_XZ said:

However, I assume that an individual company’s record does not count as a separate website.

That's correct, it's one page within a whole site, in your example a site that holds company registration records that the public have access to.

2 hours ago, John_XZ said:

So how would Google rank this particular search result against normal websites?

Search engines try to match your query such as "3796825 CANADA INC." and present you with any matches they have listed in their database. Usually you'll get several matches from pages on different sites for any search you make.

Exactly how Google and others rank sites is a closely guarded secret (Google don't tell anyone!) but there are a myriad of things that can influence ranking including:

• the word(s) you are searching for, if a page has the exact phrase "3796825 CANADA INC." then it's likely that page may be useful to you so come up higher in the results
• the age of the site, sometimes older sites are seen as more trustworthy for good information
• relevancy, under the hood search engines use many algorithms to get results, they would probably know that "3796825 CANADA INC." looks like a company registration number so they will filter results that way
   

To add to what @BlueDreamer said: corporate registrars are generally 'seen' as an authoritative source of information, so usually they are ranked on the first page for the company in question, often in positions 2-5.

But there exceptions to this depending on what people search for. For example, if lots of people searched for '796825 CANADA INC. reviews', reviews pages may rank higher than the company/corp registration page. In my experience, most companies get a combination of their website home page, reviews, company registration information and social media accounts on the first page of results.

I don't know for certain, but I imagine that their ordering is based on what users click-on the most.

 

2 hours ago, Rich C said:

I don't know for certain, but I imagine that their ordering is based on what users click-on the most.

Yes I'd guess that search engines might well use popularity as a ranking signal (though Google will never tell you that). It makes sense to use a signal like that because a popular page could provide an answer for a lot of  people asking the same or similar question.