Google has lent its support to suicide prevention hotlines, giving them automatic relevancy to queries related to taking one’s own life.

Generally speaking, getting higher in Google’s organic rankings requires a dedicated SEO effort both on and off-site, or at the very least a content generation strategy that directs a huge proportion of web traffic to your site. By manipulating dozens of factors, brands, companies and website hosts aim to get their content higher up the search results page.

However despite it’s meteoric commercial success, Google has always presented itself as a company with a moral aspect. Recently, the world’s largest search engine has entered a non-commercial partnership with suicide prevention agencies that seems to solidify this image.

Now, searches conducted on Google such as “ways to commit suicide” and “suicidal thoughts” will deliver a toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the charity’s site will get automatic precedence in the search rankings. Rather than simply fulfil its function as providing users with such troubling information as suicide tips, Google now directs people to prevention hotlines and more responsible guidance.

Although this started in the US, reports from British newspapers indicate that a similar system is in place in other countries including the UK.

As controversial as the claim may be in the business world, the company was founded with the rough motto of “Don’t be evil”; this may have been increasingly questioned as time goes on – and many people see it as nothing but a PR tactic – but in recent months, the company appears to have made something of a return to these principles.

Google artificially manipulated its rankings for troubling search terms for the first time several months ago, delivering a phone number for the national poison control hotline after searches like “poison emergency”. Dr Roni Zeiger, Google’s chief health strategist, told The New York Times that this was put in place after a Google user suggested that it could help people find information when they are in desperate need of it.

This may just be a small development in the wider picture of Google search but if the company rolled out the policy to other terms, it could have ramifications for the wider world of search engine optimisation. Although few people would argue with the morality of it, many people are concerned whenever Google directly manipulates its results.