The Google Files, Part V
I should reiterate that I’m not a Google insider, but as an SEO expert I have been following the ins and outs of Google for 25 years. And so I have a unique perspective.
So here’s what happened from my view.
Remember when I talked about the “Medic” update? Again, that was the first of many Core Algo Updates where Google would tweak search rankings in order to ensure that for any search query, users saw sites with “the best content”.
For most keywords, Google still looks at more traditional signals like content, links, the technical health of your Web site, and engagement data.
But there’s a special class of keywords that Google calls YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics which they treat with special attention. These are topics that, in Google’s words, “have a high risk of harm”. They include topics about:
- YMYL Health or Safety : Topics that could harm mental, physical, and emotional health, or any form of safety such as physical safety or safety online.
- YMYL Financial Security : Topics that could damage a person’s ability to support themselves and their families.
- YMYL Society : Topics that could negatively impact groups of people, issues of public interest, trust in public institutions, etc.
- YMYL Other: Topics that could hurt people or negatively impact welfare or well-being of society.
As with most things Google does, they start with good intentions. They don’t want the parents of a sick child to be scammed in their desperation to find a cure. They don’t want your grandmother to get scammed into losing her bank account.
But think back to that video of Google headquarters in 2016.
There were clearly those, including at the highest levels of Google, who were clearly convinced that a Donald Trump presidency was a grave threat to “groups of people”, “the public interest”, “trust in public institutions”, and the “welfare and well-being of society”.
If you felt what they felt with the conviction they did, you would do what it took to make sure that Trump would not be elected again in 2020. You couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t do all you could.
How Google Went from an Unbiased to Biased
Here’s how it most likely went down:
- Starting with “the Medic” update, there were clearly controls built that could override Google’s usual ranking algorithm, which again was roughly based on how much engagement a particular site got (visits, links, mentions).
- With those controls in place, Google no doubt received the same pressure from all sides that we saw Twitter get in The Twitter Files to censor its results.
- Just as Twitter employees increasingly saw accounts like Libs of TikTok, The Babylon Bee as dangerous accounts that went beyond the pale, so Google employees likewise saw sites like The Daily Wire and The Blaze as “dangerous”
And so they applied the same controls and processes that were built to penalize Viagra and Payday Loan sites to these sites. This is why you see their non-branded SEO performance crashing and burning, maybe not all at once, but one at a time.
This was all, of course, revealed by Google Whistleblower Jack Vorhies in 2019 to James O’Keefe. Among other things, he released internal documents that showed that yes, there was a literal list that suppressed certain sites from Google results.
- In 2018 a for-profit organization called NewsGuard was formed.
As with many organizations of this ilk it started with good intentions—to combat bias and misleading information in news. But as with all of these kinds of sites (see Wikipedia, Quora, Politifact) it soon became infested with leftist activists masquerading under the imprimateur of a “fair, unbiased organization”.
Prior to this, Google had to rely on internal processes to blacklist sites. But after NewsGuard, they could do it with impunity, now that there was a “fair, unbiased source”.
5. In May 2024, there was a leak of thousands of internal Google documents that revealed many of the inner workings of Google’s organic algorithm. One of the revelations was that—as many SEO experts suspected was the case—Google did indeed maintain whitelists of domains for certain topics including COVID-19 and elections. There is literally code in the Google algorithm that references isElectionAuthority and IsCovidLocalAuthority, presumably to boost sites that are considered as “authorities” by Google.
While some may insist that these safeguards by Google are necessary for preventing the spread of “misinformation”, we saw with our own eyes what happened with Twitter. They began banning speech of people who most people would consider extremists, but that quickly escalated into banning anyone who even questioned the narrative that the government and the media wanted you to parrot. While there were a handful of classical liberals who continued to live by “I do not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, it was shocking to see how many on the progressive left embraced speech codes and censorship of anyone who did not agree with their views.
What was the result?
Well, the result is what we saw in the last post. Conservative sites weren’t “banned” from Google, but because they were deemed “not authoritative”, they were pushed down in the search results.
Every SEO expert can tell you that users often don’t look past the first five results, rarely click to page 2 of search results, and NEVER go past page 3.
This impacted Google News as well. Google news maintained a list of approved “authority” sites. Some of these authority sites include far-left publications like The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and even the DNC. But unlike in 2016 there are NO conservative Web sites that are on the approved list. This results in Google’s “automated” digest of headlines and articles being heavily slanted to the left, all the time while they hide behind statements that their algorithms don’t favor any particular view.
It’s clear that these changes had a devastating effect on conservative Web sites. Next, let’s look at the impact they had on progressive Web sites.
