Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results
A few days after the 2016 election, at an internal meeting later leaked to Breitbart News, top Google executives, including Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Kent Walker, lamented President Trumpโs victory, comparing Trump voters to โextremistsโ and discussing their desire to
make Trumpโs election and the populist movement a โblipโ in history.
True to their word, four years later, Google is deliberately working to interfere with the reelection of Trump in 2020.
There are several ways in which Google is interfering in the 2020 election, but this article will focus primarily on one of them: political search bias.
Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election
Search visibility is a key industry measure of how findable a publisherโs content is in Google search. New data shows that Google has suppressed Breitbartโs search visibility by 99.7 percent since 2016.
On April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top ten search positions (i.e., on the first page of Google search results) for 355 key search terms; but now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart ranks in the top ten search position for only one search term. And, on April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top 100 search positions for 16,820 key search terms; but now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart ranks in the top ten search positions for only 55 search terms.
Moreover, organic Google search traffic to Breitbart (measured by unique visitors) is down 63 percent when comparing the first half of 2016 with the first half of 2020.
Google Just Killed All Search Traffic to Breitbart for Joe Biden and Joe Biden-Related Searches
After Googleโs May core search update on or about May 5, 2020, Google search impressions and search traffic to Breitbart for โJoe Bidenโ and other Biden-related search terms has gone to zero.
Zero. The following graph clearly illustrates the foregoing.
Breitbart News spoke to an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert, a 25-year industry veteran, whose job consists of analyzing traffic data from Googleโs own website performance portal, Google Search Console.
The expert, who wished to remain anonymous, said he had never seen anything like this graph โ and that it indicates highly probable manipulation on the part of Google.
โIโve never experienced such a wholesale removal of rank and visibility on specific concepts on a site as I have seen being applied to Breitbart,โ said the expert. โRemoval 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.โ
โThe 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.โ
Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results