Help To Prevent Google From Censoring Search Search Results.

Eric Renderking Fisk | November 25th, 2018

A little follow-up to the controversy that began when Jason Cousineau and I discovered that my article “The Information Is Not Secure” was missing from Google's Search results...What I have learned since that podcast and is something all Graphic Designers and Webmasters who build web pages need to know, specifically some steps you need to take to troubleshoot your older pages or steps you need to incorporate into your procedure when creating new content.

First Step: If you create web pages on your website, you need to use Google's Search Engine Console AND Google Plus' Structured Testing Tool, Pinterest's Rich Pins Validator, Twitter Card Validator, Facebook's Open Graph Object Debugger, and Bing's Webmaster tools. Sign up for these services now if you haven't' already; You're going to need these tools for later.

— Keep in mind that this will not remain a complete list, as I'm sure there will be more “Webmaster Developer Tools” that will be introduced after November 2018.

Second Step: Make all pages adaptive. Google is now demanding that ALL web pages be adaptive meaning that pages need to adapt to what device it's on - it has to render "correctly" depending on whether it's on a Smart Phone, Tablet, and desktop computer. That means you have to go back and reformat all your old web pages to the adaptive format because If they're not adaptive then Google's Search engine doesn't recognize them or will remove them from their search results.

— A web page that is not "adaptive" is the best excuse I think Google has for blocking some content in their search results. Your specific page is not indexed by the Googlebot because it's not "adaptive" and this might be the only way to get all webmasters and content creators to conform to their new standards. But what happens after a web page like "The Information Is Not Secure" has been reformated? We'll see later in this rant...

Third Step: ALL images have to have both "ALT" and "Title" tags.

Fourth Step: All your web pages need Meta tags that include Open GL tags...

Fifth Step: Once you think you're a page is done, use the aforementioned tools to verify your new page and check out the results.

Sixth and Final Step: Brace yourselves. Even after you've done everything correctly your page might still fail with Google's Search Engine Console. Google just won't like your perfectly formatted page after it's scan that takes up to two minutes to perform. Google's algorithm looks for words and phrases that our Digital Overlords don't like and simply says it can't be indexed without giving a reason.

Google Search Console

Google testing if Live URL can be indexed.

Or, in the case of “The Information Is Not Secure Fedora Chronicles” as a search result, I requested it be indexed, it waited a couple of minutes, then did a search again... and there it was as the first search result. This weekend I came back to do the same search again - the same exact phrase in the search box - and my article didn't come up anywhere in the search results.

I went back to Google's Search Engine Console, inspected the URL, the SEC didn't find anything wrong, so again I clicked "Request Indexing," and did a fresh search in another "Incognito Chrome Window," and it showed up again, top of the page in the search results. We will see if my article is still there in a week and we do another search for “The Information Is Not Secure Fedora Chronicles” on Google.

The fact remains, we can do everything correctly and still have a web page disappear from Google's search results for reasons that we may suspect but only Google knows for sure. It's obvious that I have found at least one example of Google removing pages I've created for The Fedora Chronicles... and while I'm reformatting some of my older pages I've been doing searches and haven't found any other pages that have been removed from Google's search results.

Now it is clear is that Google is censoring some articles based on content.

Google and their web crawler "Googlebot" don't like articles that point out that The United States Government is incapable of keeping the lid tight on their secrets, can't prevent their most secure files off of other sites like Wikileaks, and they don't need to be reminded how incompetent the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) actually is more than a decade after it's creation. Or they don't like me reminding you on a website that looks at pop culture and current events via the lens of amateur historians pointing this out?

Do they not like being reminded of this during the busiest travel season, or while charges are being filed against Julian Assange?

Is it me? Is it personal? Or should I take this as "Badge Of Honor," like I am doing already?

If you know of any other social media tools we can use to help better "index" web pages in the future or if you have found your content has been erased from Search Engine Results, be sure to let us know via our Facebook page or send me a message via Twitter... Thanks in advance!