Does Google suppress search results for conservative websites? Enquiring minds want to know. And as the owner-operator of a conservative website, I certainly want to know!

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently when monitoring the referral stats for my website HeartlandDiaryUSA.com. In general, usage of my site has been increasing, but when it comes to referrals from search engines, something has looked terribly wrong for the past several weeks.

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On Thursday, October 1, for instance, I had a total of 236 referrals from search engines. That’s a tiny number for a big website, but for my little operation, it was a pretty good day. But when you looked at the numbers, something disturbing was revealed. Out of the total 236 referrals, 118 or a full 50 percent of them came from DuckDuckGo.com. On the other hand, only 8 referrals came from Google, or 3.3 percent. The rest came from Bing (75 total or 32 percent), Yahoo (30 total or 12.7 percent) and AOL (5 or about 2 percent).

So what is wrong with that? According to StatCounter (at
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share), the Google search engine has 92.26 percent of the market share worldwide. DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, has half a percent (0.5) of the worldwide market share.

It would certainly appear that Google is suppressing search engine results for my website’s content. If DuckDuckGo’s 118 referrals represents just 0.5 percent of all Internet searches, then Google’s referrals to my website should be 21,773 to represent its market share of 92.26 percent.

Nor is this a one-time phenomenon. The day before, on Sept. 30, there were 254 search engine referrals to my website. On that day, only 4 came from Google. That is a remarkably low 1.5 percent! You would think with that kind of miserable performance, Google would go out of business — but it appears instead that Google wants me and other conservative websites to go out of business.

The very low referral stats from Google to my website are a relatively recent development. Even just a month ago, Google would almost always be the top search engine sending readers to HeartlandDiaryUSA.com. No, it never reached into the thousands, but at least on most days it would be a higher number than any other search engine. Now, it is consistently at the low end. The timing seems suspicious.

If Google wanted to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, there was no better way to do that than to silence conservative pro-Trump websites like HeartlandDiaryUSA.com. Their search algorithm would easily reveal that I am a Trump-supporting, Fake-News-hating journalist who is dedicated to exposing the socialist anti-American policies of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But the difference in impact I can have with 21,000 referrals a day from Google instead of 8 is huge. Multiply that across the entire Internet and you can see what a ginormous impact Google can have on the flow of information prior to the election.

The reason I decided to write about these stats is because the Daily Caller, a much more important conservative website than my own, has just challenged Google over suppression of its web traffic. Editor-in-chief Geoffrey Ingersoll took to Twitter on Thursday to publicly complain about how Google had suppressed a story on the World Health Organization’s abortion advocacy. (The Federalist later wrote a story about the Daily Caller complaint, which you can read here.)

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I decided to test Google and other search engines to see how they rank my stories in comparison to each other when using specific searches. This followed a protocol set up by the Daily Caller in monitoring their own suppression.

The results were not all consistent, but there was an indication that at least some stories on HeartlandDiaryUSA.com are being suppressed.

I started with my top story from Oct. 1, an analysis of the Sept. 29 presidential debate that was headlined, “Chris Wallace disgraces himself & Fox News in first debate; now he needs to go away.” Just as with the Daily Caller test, I discovered that even if I searched for the actual headline of the story, a link to the story did not appear until Page 6 of the search results on Oct. 2. When I re-tested on Oct. 3, the story appeared on Page 4 of the search results. Either way, it meant the story was virtually invisible, as most readers will not scroll that far while reading casually.

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By comparison, if you searched for the headline “Chris Wallace disgraces himself & Fox News in first debate; now he needs to go away” (without putting it in quotes) on either DuckDuckGo or Bing, the story came up as the very first result. Clearly, Google’s algorithm is either inept or intentionally suppressing results leading to my website.

Of course, most readers won’t search for a story by its headline, because they won’t know what the headline is. But when doing content searches by keyword, even when including “Miele” or “Heartland” among the keywords, Google consistently returned results for my posts at a much lower level than either DuckDuckGo or Bing, or not at all.

This isn’t a scientific inquiry, but the results are certainly suggestive. To borrow a phrase, Caveat scrutator: Let the searcher beware.

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Heartland Diary is solely operated by Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will SUBSCRIBE to www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com by leaving your email address on the home page. Also please consider purchasing one of my books. They are available through the following Amazon links. My new book is “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” and is now available in paperback and as an eBook. It is 536 pages long and chock full of research on the progressive movement and the patriotic heroes who have fought against it. My earlier books include “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” and the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” As an Amazon Associate, I may earn referral fees for qualifying purchases through links on my website. Also please subscribe to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use.