You might remember the incident last year when a Google update essentially shadow banned all health websites not owned by billion dollar corporations.
Without anyone noticing, they stopped showing the results of hundreds, if not thousands, of non-institutional health websites — some of them quite reputable and well-established.
In a nutshell, Google has stopped showing you the information that you want to see. Instead, Google is taking it on themselves to decide what health information you are allowed to see.
This censorship has come in the form of Google deliberately placing a systematic penalty on the vast majority of health sites to make sure that they don’t show up on the first page of search results. This includes SelfHacked, our flagship website where we have been providing information on natural, science-based health topics for many years.
If you haven’t already heard about this, you’re probably thinking that I sound crazy, but if you don’t believe me, just look up the terms “natural cancer treatments” in Google and Bing. Check out the difference in the types of results that you see on the first page.
Or you can try to do a Google search for any other health information, and look at which websites show up on the first page – websites owned by big corporations, usually aligned or partnered with pharmaceutical companies. Google (Alphabet) itself has a pharmaceutical division.
The Problem with Google’s “Thought Policing”
Some people might say that Google is a private company and they can run their search engine however they want. That may be true, except for the lack of transparency from Google about what they are doing.
Google has been pretending like there’s an algorithm that is fair and anyone can rank so long as their content is high quality. This used to be true, but not anymore.
Most people don’t use Google thinking that they are taking sides in a debate or suppressing thousands of health websites because they don’t align with Google’s ideology — they see it as a tool or medium to find information.
Users don’t see it as Google’s job to tell you what you should be looking for, or what you should or shouldn’t be allowed to know about. Searchers want Google to give them the information they are seeking.
Google is being dishonest by pretending to be an unbiased medium — but in actuality, they are pushing their agenda and ideology onto people.
Now, if people are “cheating” and using “black-hat” SEO tricks to inflate their rankings, then I completely understand why those sites should be penalized. But we followed all of the rules, and we’re still being censored.
All of our content is backed by science, written by scientists and reviewed by medical professionals. Despite this, we were penalized and have not
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