Now, any time you enter a health-related search word into Google, such as "heart disease" or "Type 2 diabetes," you will not find Mercola.com articles in the search results. The only way to locate any of my articles at this point is by searching for "Mercola.com heart disease," or "Mercola.com Type 2 diabetes."
Even skipping the ".com" will minimize your search results, and oftentimes the only pages you'll get are blogs, not my full peer-reviewed articles. Negative press by skeptics has also been upgraded, which means if you simply type in my name none of my articles will come but what you will find are a deluge of negative articles voicing critiques against me in your searches. Try entering my name in Yahoo or Bing and you will see completely different results.
As explained by Telapost,3 a core update "is when Google makes several changes to their main (core) algorithm." In the past, Google search results were based on crowdsource relevance. An article would ascend in rank based on the number of people who clicked on it.
Traditionally, if you produced unique and high-quality content that matched what people were looking for, you were rewarded by ranking in the top of search results. You would find Mercola.com near the top of nearly any health search results.
So, let's say one of my articles on diabetes was seventh on the page for your search; if more people clicked on that link than, say, an article listed in third or fifth place, my article would move up in rank. In a nutshell, Google search results were, at least in part, based on popularity.
That's no longer the case. Instead, Google is now manually lowering the ranking of undesirable content, largely based on Wikipedia's assessment of the author or site.
Wikipedia's founder and anonymous editors are well-known to have extreme bias against natural health content and authors. Google also contributes heavily to funding Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is near the top of nearly all searches despite the anonymous aspect of contributors. Who better to trust than a bunch of unknown, unqualified contributors?
Wikipedia's co-founder even admits these bad actors have made it a "broken system."4 Why would Google give such credibility to a platform that even its own founder says is broken and overrun with bad actors?
Google's new quality rater guidelines are a death knell for experts whose views threaten industry profits
Another major change was Google's 2019 quality rater guidelines,5,6 released May 16. What are these guidelines? As explained by Telapost:7
"Google hires 'quality raters,' people who visit websites and evaluate their quality. Their feedback doesn't directly impact your site; it goes to engineers who update the Google algorithm in an effort to display great websites to their users. The guidelines give us great insight as to what Google considers a quality web page."
One significant change: Google now buries expert views if they're deemed "harmful" to the public. As explained by The SEM post:8
"There has been a lot of talk about author expertise when it comes to the quality rater guidelines " This section has been changed substantially " [I]f the purpose of the page is harmful, then expertise doesn't matter. It should be rated Lowest!"
Google used to rank pages based on whether an author could prove their expertise based on how many people visited a page or the number of other reputable sites that linked to that page. No more.
As you may have noticed, we've stayed on top of this, even creating a peer review panel of medical and scientific experts that review, edit and approve most articles before they're published. This is in addition to my own medical expertise as a board-certified physician.
My articles are also fully referenced, most containing dozens of references to studies published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Alas, none of this now matters, as the very fact that the information I present typically contradicts industry propaganda places me in the lowest possible rating category.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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