There have been a number of recent articles claiming that Google is biased against conservative websites causing loss of traffic and income while actually artificially promoting those on the left. Here’s the most poignant report that I have found on this subject. From PJ Media:
A new research paper from Leo Goldstein claims to have quantified Google’s bias against leading conservative sites—…
"Google Search is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains and against conservative domains with a confidence of 95%," Goldstein found. "Further, certain hard-Left domains have such a high [percentage of domain traffic, referred by Google Search, net of brand searches] that their standing raises suspicions that they have been hand-picked for prominent placement," he says, adding that "certain respected conservative domains are blacklisted."
In an email to PJ Media Goldstein warned that a number of conservatives sites, including PJM, could be the victims of Google bias:
Dear Editors,
You might be interestted to learn, that your websites have been almost blacklisted by Google. "Almost blacklisted" means that Google search artificially downranks results from your websites to such extent that you lose 55% – 75% of possible visitors traffic from Google. This sitution is probably aggravated by secondary effects, because many users and webmasters see Google ranking as a signal of trust. …
Here’s another article claiming that Google’s YouTube is also involved discriminating against conservative video’s:
Since YouTube enacted a new advertiser-friendly strategy in March that gives more control to brands over where their ads show up on the online video sharing platform, alarms have been sounded that YouTube may be unfairly demonetizing videos posted by Trump supporters, conservatives and Christians. …
Dr. Michael Brown, a conservative radio host whose ministry operates the "AskDrBrown" YouTube account, wrote an op-ed in August, explaining that YouTube demonetized most of the account’s videos and that the ministries’ advertising revenue from YouTube has dropped by over 65 percent because of the demonetization.
Also see the following from the Blaze: “Report: Google is biased against conservative websites”
Response: I have been putting off writing this article for some time. Complaining about Google is tantamount to challenging the IRS to inspect your personal finances with a fine tooth comb. Nothing good can really come of it and a whole lot of potential harm. Google in fact controls a large part of traffic on the Internet and if your website is purposely ignored by their search engine then you pretty much disappear.
At this point I actually have nothing left to lose. This website has been going since 2006 and has seen an increase in readers every year until 2017. A little over a year ago the traffic on this site put it among the top 5% of faith based websites but now we have nearly disappeared. A year ago if I ‘googled’ the titles of one of my articles it would show up usually on page one in a search but now it doesn’t show at all. Two other major websites feature and republish our articles and they do still show up but no direct link to an article on this website domain any longer.
First we came under a leftist POS attack which took out our host servers three times and then the traffic referrals from Google began to dry up after that. My articles are still getting referrals from Bing and some others but very little now from Google. The internet experts from my hosting company explained away the loss as an unfortunate result of the POS attacks claiming that Google’s trust in a site decreases exponentially when a server is taken down and their referral links are broken.
I accepted that explanation until I started reading about other conservative sites going through similar problems with loss of traffic from Google. The loss claimed for some conservative sites in the article above of 55%-75% is no joke. The loss of traffic on this site is closer to 80%.
Then a few months ago Google AdSense suspended the ads on this site for 30 days with a warning that we somehow violated their use provisions. Never did get a full explanation of what we actually did. This was a serious blow since the Google advertising pays for a large percentage of our hosting bill. They are up again but since the traffic is way down so is the revenue.
This is causing me to evaluate what I am going to do with this site in the future and how much time I’m going to actually continue to devote to it. I have always considered this to be part of my ministry. But from the view point of being a minister it is like going from preaching to thousands in a mega church to a handful in a struggling country congregation all in one year. I still have several hundred devoted readers and subscribers that I am thankful for and the site still receives international traffic from all around the world but where can I best put the little time I have to reach the most folks for Christ?
I even thought about starting over with a new website and domain since I am confident that within a month I could beat the traffic this site is now receiving. But I still have a lot of visitors on my Bible Q & A and Bible Study pages so I’m not going to abandon the Answers For The Faith domain. In fact the Q & A page now receives twice the numbers of visitors than the main site. I haven’t really put anything new up on that page for quite awhile but Google still links to the articles there and the traffic has been maintained.
Even my Apologetica website has held up well as has the traffic on Charismatica where I write occasional articles about revival targeting the Charismatic and Pentecostal Christian community. Since it is the main Answers For The Faith page where I write about culture and religion that is having the traffic decline, I can only conclude that it is the topics themselves which have caused the problem.
After much prayer I have decided to continue putting up posts on religion and culture and current issues on the main page but spend more time on Bible Study and Bible Q & A articles than I have been. Bible Q & A and Bible study articles use to be published on the main page until I rolled them off to a separate page. In the future they will receive a link and referral on the main page like Apologetica articles usually do.
So we will keep on keeping on and hope for your continued support and prayers in the Process. *Top