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A drop in the SERPs doesn't mean censorship. Google updates their algorithms routinely and the SEO landscape is quite volatile. Furthermore, "blackballing" woul

A drop in the SERPs doesn't mean censorship. Google updates their algorithms routinely and the SEO landscape is quite volatile. Furthermore, "blackballing" would mean a complete de-indexing from Google and that doesn't appear to be the case. Just glancing at many of these sites, one can see numerous basic SEO issues: poor mobile usability, broken UI, lack of schema.org markup, not leveraging AMP, heavy "page weight", etc. Again, glancing through these site, there is very little reporting and mostly opinion pieces being published. In several cases, I also see quite a number of "re-blogged" pieces which are of little to no value in terms traffic. If I had to guess, most of these sites probably suffer from poor back-link profiles and are rarely cited by other sites with good page rank.

otalp 9y ago
Eric Schmidt has said outright that he's "deranking" particular sites that Google has targeted specifically (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/21/google-de-rank-russia-today-sputnik-combat-misinformation-alphabet-chief-executive-eric-schmidt https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/21/google-de...). Other sites like The Intercept, which does indeed do very good original reporting, while criticising the hysteria over Russia, have also been hit.
- mtberatwork 9y ago
  Again, there are a myriad of reasons as to why a site may drop or rise in the SERPs. A drop in rankings does not imply censorship. Every single site plays the algorithm dance with Google. The Intercept hasn't been removed from the SERPs or Google News[1]. Keep in mind that they compete with all other media organizations for positioning in Google Search and Google News. Google News alone is a highly competitive landscape and small newsrooms are at a severe disadvantage compared to larger orgs that operate at scale. Reporting on a topic doesn't guarantee an article will be the top hit when a thousand other organizations are reporting on the same topic. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:theintercept.com https://www.google.com/search?q=site:theintercept.com

otalp 9y ago

Eric Schmidt has said outright that he's "deranking" particular sites that Google has targeted specifically (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/21/google-de-rank-russia-today-sputnik-combat-misinformation-alphabet-chief-executive-eric-schmidt https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/21/google-de...). Other sites like The Intercept, which does indeed do very good original reporting, while criticising the hysteria over Russia, have also been hit.

mtberatwork 9y ago
Again, there are a myriad of reasons as to why a site may drop or rise in the SERPs. A drop in rankings does not imply censorship. Every single site plays the algorithm dance with Google. The Intercept hasn't been removed from the SERPs or Google News[1]. Keep in mind that they compete with all other media organizations for positioning in Google Search and Google News. Google News alone is a highly competitive landscape and small newsrooms are at a severe disadvantage compared to larger orgs that operate at scale. Reporting on a topic doesn't guarantee an article will be the top hit when a thousand other organizations are reporting on the same topic. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:theintercept.com https://www.google.com/search?q=site:theintercept.com