Casa Giraldi - Traffic vs Authority

While in Mexico City, we made reservations to go to one of Luis Barragan’s houses, a very famous modern Mexican architect. While the search term Luis Barragan gets barely 1K searches per month in the US, in Mexico the search term jumps to almost 15K searches per month. This might be for a number of reasons but it caught my attention that you can find widely different volumes for certain keywords depending on where you are located. 

The top 3 results for each website are Luis’s Wikipedia page, then http://www.casaluisbarragan.org/and lastly https://www.barragan-foundation.org. After doing some additional research I noticed something that did not make any sense, casaluisbarragan.org was getting significantly less traffic than barragan-foundation.org, ten times less traffic to be exact yet casaluis-barragan.org was the second result. When you add to this that barragan-foundation is missing a secure connection via https this only makes the mystery more interesting.

The reason this happens is because Google ranks search results based on domain authority and not traffic. The higher the authority of a domain, regardless of its traffic the better the chance to show up at the top of search engines.