Friday 24 February 2017

No, Google Didn't Remove NaturalNews.com Because Of Fake News

I wasn’t planning on covering this story over here, but I keep getting people asking me on Twitter about why NaturalNews.com was deindexed by Google. People are saying it was because of “fake news” but that is not the case.

I covered the story yesterday afternoon at Search Engine Land where Google told us they are violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. Fake news is NOT a violation of Google’s guidelines. Yes, Google may drop AdSense publishers from making money with fake news or they may have tweaked their news algorithms but they would not delist a site for fake news.

Why not delist a site for fake news? Well, some people like these sites and they want to read and be part of a community around this stuff. It might be known as alternative facts or whatever. I don’t judge or care what people read and Google wants you to find content on these sites when you search for those topics. But it doesn’t deindex, at least today, sites for fake news or sites for being pro-Trump as the site said after it was deindexed.

Google’s statement to us read:

We don’t comment on individual sites, but if we find that a site violates one or more of our Webmaster Guidelines we may take manual action against it. For webmasters who have questions about their own sites, our Webmaster team provides support through platforms such as the Webmaster Forums. Once a site has remedied the problem, the webmaster can submit the site for reconsideration.

So what was the issue if not fake news? Who knows, it could be tons of things. The site claimed they did not get a notification in the Google Search Console. I am not sure I believe that but it doesn’t matter – Google does penalize sites without notifying them of the penalty in Google Search Console often enough.

The one thing that was weird to me that during all this talk about this site being delisted, Google’s John Mueller tweeted about an old penalty from 2015:

The sneaky mobile redirects penalty from 2015. Could it be that? Possibly but only Google knows.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

The post No, Google Didn't Remove NaturalNews.com Because Of Fake News appeared first on On Page SEO Checker.



source http://www.onpageseochecker.com/no-google-didnt-remove-naturalnews-com-because-of-fake-news/

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