Request for Assistance

[George W. Maschke]

As noted in an update to the blog posting, the situation with Google's de-listing of AntiPolygraph.org seems to be worse than I imagined. The following is a screenshot from Google Search Console Beta:

The chart shows that over the past 16 months, Google reports 146,576 impressions for the search word "polygraph," with an average position of 8.4, but only 381 total clicks, for an average click through rate of just 0.3%.

And both impressions and, as a natural consequence, click throughs, have flatlined since March.

[webghost]

As of today, September 9, 2021,

If you use the search "polygraph" with the search engine Yandex.com in the Chrome browser, there is a hit for Antipolygraph.org on the second page, which would be the 17th result.

If you use the search "polygraph" with the search engine Yandex.com in the Tor browser, there is a link on the first page at the very bottom for Antipolygraph.org, about the 10th result.

If you use the search "polygraph" with the search engine Yandex.com in the Epic browser (which has built-in VPNs), there is a link on the first page for Antipolygraph.org, about the 7th result.

Searching "polygraph" in Google with the Chrome browser yields no results on the first five pages, so I stopped looking after that.

It is not uncommon for Google to block controversial topics either by choice or secret government order.  If you Google sites like purenudism.com, enaturelive.com, or bebaretoo.com, you will not get any results that show those actual websites.  However, Yandex search engine will show them.  Those websites are hosted in the U.S. and feature family nudity which is perfectly legal in the U.S.  All of those sites are run by the same people and they have had their fair share of legal battles to which they prevailed.  Since those sites feature child nudity, U.S. search engines like Google just gave up and blocked them.  Yandex is a Russian search engine and Russia somewhat legalizes child nudity, or they just don't care, and will show those sites and similar sites.  Same thing with this antipolygraph website.  The U.S. government deemed this site too controversial so since they have no legal course to take it down, they just had the U.S. search engines block it.  Other  non-U.S. search engines will still show this site with a "polygraph" keyword search.

[quickfix]

If you google "antipolygraph", it is the first listing.

[George W. Maschke]

Google's effective de-listing of AntiPolygraph.org on the search term "polygraph" continues, and if anything, is even worse than the last time (in 2018) that I posted an update to this thread. The following is a screen shot from Google Search Console:

The chart shows that over the past 16 months, Google reports 26.6 thousand impressions for the search word "polygraph," with an average position of 24.9, and only 90 total clicks, for an average click through rate of just 0.3%.

In my opinion, something is not kosher here.

[E. Owen]

George

Have you checked the search stats on the other engines:

1.  BING

2.  YAHOO

Searches of BING and YAHOO here in Toronto rank you real high.  Same thing goes for Google for the most part.

Supposedly BING is getting more and more popular.

[George W. Maschke]

E. Owen,

Yahoo serves results from Bing, and Bing Webmaster tools also shows virtually no traffic to AntiPolygraph.org based on keyword searches for "polygraph." The following screenshot indicates that over the past three months, Bing searches for "polygraph" yielded one click on AntiPolygraph.org:



In any event, Google searches are the metric that matters most, because Google commands about 90% of the global search market.

[RobbieG]

George,

Is it possible to confirm that Google is indeed manipulating something here? I don't know much about this stuff, but I wonder if an SEO expert or someone like that could run some kind of experiment.

[George W. Maschke]

George,

Is it possible to confirm that Google is indeed manipulating something here? I don't know much about this stuff, but I wonder if an SEO expert or someone like that could run some kind of experiment.

I am not aware of any kind of experiment that could be done to confirm or disconfirm this.