Google’s June 2019 update, which took effect June 3, effectively removed Mercola.com from Google search results
When entering a
health-related search word into Google, you no longer find Mercola.com
articles in the search results. Instead, you find links to plagiarized
articles uploaded without permission by unranked sites
You also can no
longer locate the most pertinent Mercola articles by doing a selective
search for my site, as Google provides search results for my veterinary
pages instead
YouTube also now buries Mercola videos even when doing a selective search
The
“Google-trusted” health websites that now dominate health searches are
WebMD and Healthline, both of which promote health-harming drugs and
junk food with their articles
June 3, 2019, Google implemented a broad “core update”1
that in one fell swoop eliminated most Mercola.com pages from its
search results. Virtually overnight, Google traffic to my site dropped
by approximately 99.9%.
Considering Mercola.com has been the most visited natural health
site for the last 16 years, it’s no great surprise that we were listed
as one of the biggest losers in Google’s June algorithm update.2
I wrote about the ramifications of Google’s core update in two articles at the end of June 2019. In Part 1, I discussed the effects that the new search algorithm and updated quality rater guidelines is having on traffic to this site.
As mentioned in that article, Google’s “quality raters” are manually
lowering the ranking of what they arbitrarily decide is undesirable
content and burying even expert views if they think they’re “harmful” to
the public.
In Part 2,
I revealed how Wikipedia censors information and crafts narratives to
benefit certain groups, and how Google raters use Wikipedia’s skewed
and biased articles to ascertain the expertise and trustworthiness of
any given author or website.
Today's videos and article will show you just how clearly and
deliberately Google has eliminated my articles from its search results.
After more than 15 years of being considered a highly relevant
source of content, Google has removed all those high-ranked results,
and replaced them with health information from advertising companies
that promote junk food and drugs instead. Below, I’ll provide clear
examples of how this works.
For many years now, I’ve been warning about how Google’s monopoly
presents a clear danger to the free-flow of information, and health
information in particular, seeing how holistic health is a direct
threat to the drug industry. The fact that Google would eventually grow
big enough to dictate what people see and don’t see was predictable,
and we’ve now entered the era of blatant internet censorship.
How Google Censors High-Ranked Health Content
A major reason for my success as a physician running my own practice
was the ability to resolve extremely challenging cases of arthritis.
One of my articles describing my arthritis treatment protocol generated over 1 million views, and was consistently a top search result when doing a Google search for arthritis.
Today, even if you use my name in a search for arthritis, you will
not find that highest-ranked article. What you find instead is an
article copied from my website — without permission — by a Croatian
website operated by Zdravko Mauko, followed by a few articles about
arthritis from my pet site, followed by a short piece about arthritis
that I contributed to Creations Magazine.
The top search result for “Mercola arthritis” is a tiny,
insignificant site that in no way, shape or form could possibly
compete with Mercola.com. When you compare the ranking of our sites
on Alexa, you find my site (as of October 8, 2019) ranks 9,002 in
global internet engagement over the past 90 days.3
And that’s despite having been buried by Google since early June, as two years ago our overall Alexa ranking was 3,708. Compare this to our-arthritis.com, which has a ranking of 9,401,920.4
The first screen shot below is Alexa’s ranking for Mercola.com on
October 8, 2019. The second screen shot is Alexa’s ranking for
our-arthritis.com on that same day.
Another signal of trust and
popularity is based on the number of sites linking in, or the number of
sites that reference your own site. There are more than 11,000 sites
linking to Mercola.com, and only 2 linking to our-arthritis.com. This is
another example of Google's purposeful censorship.
Despite the fact that our-arthritis.com plagiarized my entire article
without permission, and have no credibility in terms of website
engagement or ranking, it “owns” the search terms “Mercola arthritis” —
above my own site!
Advertisement
Censorship Strategy No. 2 — Content Mix-Up
Giving precedence to a site with a relevance ranking that is 1,000
times lower than my own would be bad enough, but it doesn’t end there.
Even if you try to use a restricted search, which allows you to search
for results within a specific website, Google has you barking up the
wrong tree.
When doing a restricted search for “Mercola.com arthritis,” or
“site: Mercola.com arthritis,” which theoretically should provide you
with links to the most popular articles about arthritis within my site
only, Google provides the top search results for arthritis on our
veterinary website!
The entire first page of search results; 10 of 12 of the search
results on Page 2; and 6 of 10 results on Page 3 direct you to our
Healthy Pets website. How is that for relevance? Google has really
outdone itself in “helping” users find relevant information, hasn’t it?
Google-Owned YouTube Uses Similar Obfuscation Tactics
The same misdirection and obfuscation is happening on YouTube, which
is owned by Google. If you do a YouTube search for “Mercola
arthritis,” links to my many arthritis videos are blatantly pushed
aside by irrelevant search results as evidenced in the screen shot
below.
In short, it’s not a suspicion but a blatantly obvious fact that
Google is doing everything it can to erase my online presence and hide
the many tens of thousands of free articles and videos I’ve generated
over the last 22 years.
Who Now Dominates Online Health Searches?
Who are the Google-trusted health websites that now dominate health
searches? WebMD and Healthline. But are they really the most
trustworthy sources on the web? Their track records certainly suggest
otherwise.
WebMD is owned by the global investment firm KKR & Co.,5 which also owned RJR Nabisco at a time when it sold junk food and tobacco products. As described in my 2018 article, “Google and WebMD Partner To Be Your Virtual Doctor,” KKR also owns Medscape and MedincineNet.com and, according to Fast Company,6 “is trying to corner the market on internet-based health information dissemination …”
WebMD, as you may recall, was in 2010 caught providing users with a
fake depression screening test. The test — in which 100% of quiz-takers
ended up having a “high likelihood of major depression” and were
directed to talk to their doctor about treatment7,8 — was sponsored by drug giant Eli Lilly, the maker of Cymbalta.
The quiz was in fact direct-to-consumer advertising masquerading as a
valid health screen, and this is perhaps the most hazardous kind of
drug advertising there is.
Then, in 2017, Google partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, launching a depression self-assessment quiz which, like WebMD before it, funneled querents toward antidepressant drugs.9,10 There simply is no doubt that Google is a proponent for and promoter of pharmaceuticals.
Likewise, WebMD — which pockets millions to promote drugs
— is far from an independent source of health information. A quick
search of WebMD articles on antidepressants and depression, for
example, reveals a clear pattern: They contain ads for antidepressant
drugs furnished by Google ad services and doubleclick — both of which
are owned by Google.
Google-Sanctioned Health Sites Promote Ill Health
Healthline, meanwhile, is owned by Red Ventures,11
a self-described advertising agency, and promotes things like
McDonald’s home delivery services with its health articles. Isn’t that
great? You can get junk food without ever leaving your couch, courtesy
of one of Google’s most trusted health websites!
In short, WebMD and Healthline — two “health” sites that promote
some very unhealthy choices — are prioritized in search results because
they both use Google ad services. When traffic is shuttled to these
sites, Google makes more money from advertising revenue.
WebMD’s privacy policy clearly tells you about its relationship with
Google ads under its “Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies”
section:12
“The information collected by such tracking
technologies may be combined with other information that our partners
have access to, including your name, email address and physical
address, so that we can send you materials, either electronically or by
direct mail, that may be of interest to you.
Our advertising service partners may use cookies and other
tracking technologies to collect information about your use of the
WebMD Sites, including content you have viewed. These third parties may
use this information to help WebMD deliver advertising on the WebMD
Sites and on other third party websites based on your browsing activity
on the WebMD Sites.
WebMD may further tailor the advertising on the WebMD Sites and
these other third party websites based on additional information to the
extent known by WebMD or these third parties.
Two of the third parties that WebMD works with are Google and
Facebook. In addition to using the information it collects performing
services for WebMD, Google may also use such information as described
in its privacy policy …
While Facebook does not provide any personal information to
WebMD, Facebook may use information that it has about you and that it
collects performing services for WebMD (which may be associated with
personal information that Facebook has about you) as described in its
privacy policy …”
Google Violates Its Own Policy by Promoting WebMD
As mentioned earlier, Google’s updated quality rater guidelines
instructs quality raters to manually bury content deemed “harmful,”
regardless of the expertise of the author.
But the guidelines13
also tell quality raters how to identify deceptive pages, which should
be rated “lowest, regardless of intent,” and based on these guidelines,
neither WebMD nor Healthline would pass the criteria. Here’s a screen
shot of section “7.6.1 Deceptive Page Purpose” from Google’s Page
Quality Rating Guideline dated September 5, 2019:14
According to Google, “articles to manipulate users in order to
benefit a … business … or other organization … monetarily, or
otherwise” is a deceptive page and should be given the lowest possible
quality rating.
According to Google, any website that “claims to offer an
independent review or share other information about a product, but is
in fact created to make money for the owner of the website without
attempting to help users” should be given the lowest possible quality
rating. Do WebMD and Healthline profess to offer “independent” health
information that in reality makes money for the owners and don’t really
help users?
Likewise, “a webpage with a … title that has nothing to do with the
content of the page” should be given the lowest rating, yet these
websites provide “articles” that are in fact advertising, without
telling readers that what they’re looking at is an ad, or that the test
they’re taking is in fact a PR ploy designed to get them to inquire
about a drug.
In short, Google’s quality rating guideline says one thing, but in
reality, websites that should be dismissed are pushed to the top, and
vice versa — simply because that’s what benefits Google and its
advertising partners.
Google — The Antithesis to a Free Internet
Now more than ever we must work together to share health information
with others by word-of-mouth, by text and email. We have built in
simple sharing tools at the top of each article so you can easily email
or text interesting articles to your friends and family.
My information is here because all of you support and share it, and
we can do this without Big Tech’s support. It’s time to boycott and
share! Here are a few other suggestions:
Become a subscriber to my newsletter and encourage
your friends and family to do the same. This is the easiest and safest
way to make sure you’ll stay up to date on important health and
environmental issues.
If you have any friends or relatives that are
seriously interested in their health, please share important articles
with them and encourage them to subscribe to our newsletter.
Consider dumping any Android phone the next time
you get a phone. Android is a Google operating system and will seek to
gather as much data as they can about you for their benefit.
• Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include DuckDuckGo15 and Startpage16 • Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave or Opera browser instead, available for all computers and mobile devices.17
From a security perspective, Opera is far superior to Chrome and offers
a free VPN service (virtual private network) to further preserve your
privacy • If you have a Gmail account, try a non-Google email service such as ProtonMail,18 an encrypted email service based in Switzerland • Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives19 • If you’re a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts
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