Local News

How to tell you’ve been blacklisted by Google…

East Valley Post suddenly disappeared from Google Search without notice – read our first hand experience with being censored by Big Tech.

Published

3 years ago

November 18, 2020

eastvalleypost

If you were to have searched for “East Valley Post” using Google as of a week ago, here’s what you would have found…

If you kept scrolling on the first page, you would find our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram too…

Google Search Console Results for East Valley Post week of 11/08/2020 2/2 – Pre Censorship

It seems normal enough for the most relevant Google result to appear when searching for the “East Valley Post” is a website called the “East Valley post”, right?

Absolutely, it does… because Google is a tool. At East Valley Post, we run a website that shares news and information, we have a name after all, and when people choose to read our articles they need a tool to browse the web that easily filters out the millions of daily updates from other sites that aren’t from East Valley Post.

It’s really supposed to be that simple.

So why is it that now when you search for East Valley Post on Google, this is all that you can find…

Google Search Console Results for East Valley Post week of 11/15/2020 – Post Censorship

Archive link to Google search results on 11/18/2020 for “East Valley Post”…

Notice something?

The East Valley Post search results are completely gone.

Not only our homepage. But our links to other stories. Our Facebook. Instagram. Twitter… completely gone…

Did we violate some rule?

Did our site go down and Google wanted to stop sending traffic to a broken site?

Did something break, that I can fix to get this resolved?

If that was the case, let’s take a look at other browsers… certainly Google wouldn’t be the only platform that picked up on this issue…

That’s strange, it seems that only Google has hidden our site in their search results. Duck Duck Go, Bing, MSN, Yahoo, and even Dogpile show the site.

Maybe Google notified me in my admin console… Let’s check…

Google Search Console for East Valley Post 11/18/2020 showing no coverage errors.

No errors!

So… What happened?

Well, since we never were and still haven’t been informed, notified, or even warned in any way by Google- we do not know what is happening.

Google has always worked reliably for us as a normal search engine delivering relevant results to users. We have been in good standing, and never had issues with the platform.

That was the case, it seems, until we started reporting on stories that the Mainstream Media determined to be “damaging misinformation.”

What were those stories?

Here a just a few:

We are covering allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election, Democratic attacks on Thanksgiving, Big Tech and Media Censorship, and other pretty run of the mill, normal, conservative headlines…

This easily could have been your website or blog, or video…

Has your site disappeared from Google? Traffic down?

What happened to East Valley Post could be exactly what’s happening to you. There really isn’t any way to know for sure… certainly if we find out more from Google, we will let you know. But that would start with an acknowledgment that something happened to begin with which looks like won’t happen.