Google Ventures - SERP bias towards companies they invest in?

**Clinton** · May 1st, 2012, 4:00 PM

Google has their own venture capital arm: Google Ventures.

They invest in tech companies. Here's an article from a hubspot employee talking about the effect of GV on venture capital funding.

However, does anyone know if there's ever been a study published anywhere of SERP bias towards companies GV has funded?

**monty** · May 1st, 2012, 6:17 PM

Originally Posted by Clinton

However, does anyone know if there's ever been a study published anywhere of SERP bias towards companies GV has funded?

I can't remember one, and you'd think it would be unlikely for there to be any obvious pattern due to variations in age - some of the companies in the portfolio have been around for 6 or 7 years and some are the kind that naturally attract lots of backlinks anyway. In fact an investment from Google is almost guaranteed to get you lots of authority backlinks from the tech press.

Assuming that companies would include terms that they are hoping to rank for in their meta keywords section, I took a quick glance at 2 that I recognized - HomeAway , searching for "vacation rentals" and PuppetLabs, searching for "configuration management" - to see if anything obvious popped up.

Puppetlabs is not on the 1st page for me.
HomeAway is on page 1 of Google.com, at position 4 for me. Looking a bit closer however reveals that all of the 4 top sites for that search ( vacationrentals.com , vrbo.com , CyberRentals.com and HomeAway.com ) are actually owned by the same company. Maybe they are just taking their time consolidating their portfolio ...

**tke71709** · May 1st, 2012, 6:55 PM

Originally Posted by monty

HomeAway is on page 1 of Google.com, at position 4 for me. Looking a bit closer however reveals that all of the 4 top sites for that search ( vacationrentals.com , vrbo.com , CyberRentals.com and HomeAway.com ) are actually owned by the same company. Maybe they are just taking their time consolidating their portfolio ...

Why would they want to consolidate their portfolio? I'd rather own the top 4 spots then be a run away leader for the top one.

**golles** · May 2nd, 2012, 2:17 AM

somewhat related

http://www.johnon.com/774/google-seo-for-google.html

be sure to read the article linked to.

**monty** · May 2nd, 2012, 3:07 AM

Originally Posted by tke71709

Why would they want to consolidate their portfolio? I'd rather own the top 4 spots then be a run away leader for the top one.

I would too :-)
It was a mostly tongue in cheek comment as one SEO strategy is having several different domains for the same search, and going through various contortions such as using different registrars, registering under different businesses names and addresses, keeping IPs separate etc to stop Google from linking them up.

Homeaway seem to be just buying up high ranking sites in that niche, with the plan of putting them on the same backend infrastructure and using data from other sites to bulk their acquisitions up.

Anyway, it was just something unusual I noticed, and veering somewhat off Clintons question.