We've noted the "Quirky Silliness" rankings before (and see also), but this new study is an eye-opener:

Results show that universities with frequent QS-related contracts experienced much greater upward mobility in both overall rankings and in faculty-student ratio scores over five years in the QS World Rankings. Positions of Russian universities that had frequent QS-related contracts increased on .75 standard deviations (approximately 140 positions) more than they would have increased without such contracts," the study says. "In a similar way, QS faculty-student ratio scores of Russian universities that had frequent QS-related contracts increased on 0.9 standard deviations more than they would have increased without frequent QS-related contracts. Taken together, these findings suggest that conflicts of interest may produce significant distortions in global university rankings."

Chirikov calls these changes "the first empirical evidence to date that rankers’ conflicts of interest may negatively impact outcomes in university rankings."