What is search engine neutrality?

Marketing
1

Can anyone explain what is search engine neutrality? Why do we need to achieve it?

2

I’m not exactly sure what it means, but I found a blog post for you that helps you deconstruct search neautraility:

Now in an academic article, Some Skepticism About Search Neutrality, NYU associate law professor James Grimmelmann closely examines and deconstructs the arguments behind the idea of search neutrality:

Equality: Search engines shouldn’t differentiate at all among websites.

credit: wikipedia

Objectivity: There are correct search results and incorrect ones, so search engines should return only the correct ones.
Bias: Search engines should not distort the information landscape.
Traffic: Websites that depend on a flow of visitors shouldn’t be cut off by search engines.
Relevance: Search engines should maximize users’ satisfaction with search results.
Self-interest: Search engines shouldn’t trade on their own account.
Transparency: Search engines should disclose the algorithms they use to rank web pages.
Manipulation: Search engines should rank sites only according to general rules, rather than promoting and demoting sites on an individual basis.

You shouldn’t really worry about it.

3

Thanks for your reply. The link given by you was helpful. I want to know that if we manage to get links from high PR at the same time do we need to get links from low or NA PR? Is this will neutralize our SEO efforts & we don’t get caught by Google.

4

With link building, I’d do a broad mixture of low and high pr websites to make things look neutral, to many high PR links may look like they are paid and could result in a penalty.

5

Linking from a low or NA PR site does not affect your SEO efforts, until and unless the content of the linking site have a relevancy to the content of your site.

6

Search Engine Neutrality is not something you as a web developer / SEO person / whatever have to worry about.
It’s something the search engines themselves have to worry about; basically it says “treat all sites equally; don’t put extra focus on something that doesn’t deserve it, and don’t put less focus on something you don’t like.” or “Rank on what you see, not on what you like”.
Objectivity would be another word to describe it even though it’s not 100% the same.

7

It is always something to worry about, you don’t know how long they will be neutral. Remember that Google is now a public company, and income is more important than serps now, and that is a reason why Adsense users are getting paid less every year: because G needs to increase earnings every quarter of a year to please investors.

And, February 2011 proved that G is not being neutral by altering serps to prove themselves right against Bing who was copying their results; however, that weighted more on G than Bing because it simply demonstrated that G does alter serps manually != neutral

Google: Sting proves Bing copied search results
Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
[B]Microsoft: Google Manipulated Bing Search Through “Click Fraud”[/B]