While Google has been censoring Breitbart in various ways since at least 2016, greatly limiting its search visibility, the tech giant has taken things a step further in recent days by pretty much blocking the domain entirely, even when users specifically search for the word "Breitbart."
According to the news outlet, searches for "Breitbart" that occurred on April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top 10 search positions for 355 different key search terms. As of July 20, 2020, however, Breitbart now ranks in the top 10 search positions for only one search term.
On April 4, 2016, Breitbart also ranked in the top 100 search positions for 16,820 different key search terms. But now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart only ranks in the top 10 search positions for 55 search terms.
All in all, Google is now limiting the search visibility for Breitbart by up to 99.7 percent, which has resulted in organic Google search traffic to Breitbart, which is measured by the number of unique visitors, plummeting by upwards of 63 percent compared to the first half of 2016.
In essence, Google has ensured that Breitbart is virtually eliminated from all search results for news, including queries that specifically seek out Breitbart content. This means that Google users will be presented with other news instead, presumably from a left-wing perspective.
Google is specifically not allowing users to find Breitbart articles about Joe Biden
A pair of graphs compiled using data from the SISTRIX Visibility Index reveal precipitous declines in Breitbart's search visibility thanks to Google interference.
The first decline occurred shortly after, and in direct response to, the "unfavorable" results of the 2016 presidential election. The second occurred in July of 2019. And the third and most recent decline became noticeable in May of this year, which is no coincidence seeing as how this is an election year.
Not only does typing "Breitbart" into the Google search bar no longer bring up any Breitbart content, but Google also appears to have specifically censored any Breitbart content associated with Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
"Breitbart search results for 'Joe Biden' and other Biden-related search terms have gone to zero," writes Allum Bokhari. "Even if you specifically search for Breitbart News headlines, you are unlikely to find them in Google search."
And when he says zero, he actually means zero. Google does not want anyone pulling up anything "negative" about Biden that might in any way hurt his chances of winning the election and superseding President Donald Trump, whom Google desperately wants to unseat.
"On May 1, Google searches for 'Joe Biden' generated approximately 30,000 impressions (views, used as a metric for advertisers) for Breitbart links," Bokhari goes on to explain. "After May 5, both impressions and clicks went to zero."
Breitbart News was able to have a conversation with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert who has worked 25 years in the industry about what Google has done, and this person revealed that he has never before seen anything like this.
"I've never experienced such a wholesale removal of rank and visibility on specific concepts on a site as I have seen being applied to Breitbart," this expert revealed. "Removal is the key, not dropping in rank, which would be an organic devaluing. These ranks are just simply gone, overnight, while other topics have been untouched."
"The sheer fact that there are thousands of pages of Breitbart content that reference Biden that were ranking before May 6, that now have no rank or impressions on search is a sign of manipulation, not algorithmic devaluing," he added.
For more related news about Big Tech censorship, be sure to check out Censorship.news.
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