Some readers report a blacklisting problem with Google search and this blog similar to the issue that Rod Dreher was reporting which involved a number of conservative sites, but I’m not seeing it:
I noticed today that Google has blacklisted your blog from search. It’s now impossible for voxday.blogspot.com to appear in Google search results. Not surprising from those dummies.
I tested this myself this morning, and searching for “Vox Day” reveals the following results:
- DuckDuckGo: #1 VP, #2 Wikipedia, #3 Amazon
- Bing: #1 VP, #2 YouTube, #3 Amazon
- Google: #1 Wikpedia, #2 VP, #3 RationalWiki
Now, Google also shows something called Search performance for this query at the top of its searches which may or may not be informative.
Last 7 days
Clicks: 2.41K +228{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}
Impressions: 3.38K +193{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}
Avg. Position: 4.4, -0.1
Last 90 days
Clicks: 32.4K, -15{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}
Impressions: 47.5K, -11{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}
Avg. Position: 5.1, +0.9
And a search for voxday.blogspot.com brings up VP as the #1 option. So, if Google is putting a thumb on the scale concerning search results and this blog, it must only be doing it in the USA. Regardless, the number of daily clicks and impressions reported is a tiny fragment of the daily pageviews here, which now average over 100,000, so, as in the case of the Unz Report, which has seen its traffic grow considerably in the wake of its Facebook deplatforming, it really doesn’t make much of a difference how Google manipulates the search results.
In other news, I have not been deplatformed by Podbean. To the contrary, we elected to stop financially supporting Podbean, which means that MP3s from the Darkstream will no longer be available there or the various podcast services it supports. They are available at Unauthorized.