Article Image

IPFS News Link • Search Engines

Google censorship of Natural News: Statement from the Health Ranger

• http://www.naturalnews.com

(Natural News) After six days of being blacklisted by Google, the NaturalNews.com website has been restored to Google's search results. The action by Google follows the largest and most vocal backlash against Google's de-listing of any website in the history of the company, and it has sparked many new discussions and debates about search engines, censorship and free speech.

Click here to sign the White House petition demanding an end to Google censorship.

All of us at Natural News — as well as our many millions of fans — are grateful for Google's decision to restore the NaturalNews.com website, but we are also deeply troubled by the unjustified blacklisting of Natural News and what it means for free speech across the 'net.

For the record, there was never any allegation or evidence that Natural News had intentionally violated Google's webmaster guidelines. While Google said we were being flagged for a so-called "sneaky mobile redirect" on a very small number of pages in a subdomain (blogs.naturalnews.com) which were created by outside bloggers, Google went to the extraordinary step of banning the entire NaturalNews.com root domain and all its subdomains — a step that would never have been applied to CNN, Huffington Post or other popular news websites. In fact, a Natural News investigation showed that violations identified involving websites like HuffPo, Forbes and CNN did not result in the same kind of blacklisting that was applied to Natural News.

Furthermore, while Google did make an effort to provide us with one URL that they said flagged this mobile redirect, to date there hasn't been a single SEO expert or engineer who could reproduce the supposed redirect issue.

Even more disturbingly, when we went to the Google product webmaster forum to ask for help identifying this issue, we were insulted, mocked and accused of lying by Google's supporters who behaved like a pack of jackals rather than search engine professionals.

No evidence, no charges but you're "guilty" because they say you are

Through this entire process, Natural News was constantly being called a liar for failing to remove something that Google flatly refused to identify. In essence, we were charged with a "crime" by Google, yet Google refused to provide any details of the crime, nor any evidence of the crime, nor any tool whereby we could reproduce Google's claimed "redirect."

To call this process extremely frustrating for webmasters is an understatement. I continue to believe that Natural News was targeted by Google due to the content of our speech which supports President Trump… and that the "sneaky mobile redirects" issue was merely the justification used by Google to de-list the entire NaturalNews.com website. Google no doubt disagrees with this assessment and says it was just a technical issue, yet we are not aware of any other situation in which a minor technical issue on a subdomain resulted in Google blacklisting the entire ROOT domain of a major publisher, with 140,000+ pages of quality content. Natural News appears to be the only website of its size that has ever been subjected to this extreme censorship for such a minor technical issue on pages posted years ago by bloggers on a subdomain.

Free Talk Live