Free Internet Media is a web publishing firm which exists primarily to develop revenue generating web sites, but we also operate a number of sites primarily for the purpose of making the world a better place.
Many of these sites are apolitical, such as Make Happiness, but some are very political in nature, such as People’s Democracy.
Unfortunately, our experience with political web sites has introduced us to a very disturbing phenomena: Google often penalizes web sites which do not support Google’s fascist liberal agenda.
People’s Democracy receives plenty of search engine traffic from MSN and Yahoo, but Google has chosen to completely deindex the site. Google has repeatedly ignored Reconsideration Requests and has refused to discuss the issue with us. Yahoo Site Explorer shows 42,134 inbound links for the site. Google Webmaster Tools shows zero. Google has quite effectively silenced the voice of People’s Democracy.
Of course, not all Google penalties are that complete and easy to detect. Google dropped our main political blog, Fort Liberty, in the SERPS so far that Google referrer traffic fell over 90%. Fort Liberty is still indexed by Google and still shows a Page Rank of 5, but is now unable to rank for any competitive search terms in Google’s search engine. Shortly afterwards, Google kicked Fort Liberty out of the AdSense program.
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt campaigned for Barack Obama. That’s his right as an American. However, Google should not be misusing it’s considerable corporate power to make it difficult for other Americans to express their political views. That is an affront to the American concept of liberty and it is a great disservice to Google shareholders.
Google’s stock price has fallen over fifty percent from it’s high of 711.25 on November 2nd of 2007, prompting Google to initiate it’s first round of layoffs. Perhaps Schmidt should quit focusing on politics and start focusing on creating value for Google’s struggling shareholders. Instead, Schmidt used Google’s corporate funds to throw an inaugural party for President Obama. Every Google shareholder, willingly or not, contributed to paying for that party.
What Can We Do?
* Refuse to purchase Google stock.
* Refuse to spend money with Google AdWords.
* Spread the word about Google’s politically tainted search engine results and convince searchers to use alternate search engines like Yahoo.
Today, Google is the 900lb gorilla in both Internet advertising and Internet search. Nothing we do will affect Google overnight – or even in the next few years. Eventually, however, Google will be forced to deliver _unbiased_ search results or it will lose it’s place as the preeminent search engine on the net.
Brian Jones writes on Google’s Politics for Free Internet Media and is a contributor to both People’s Democracy and Fort Liberty.