Cliff LyonGoogle De-Ranks OneUtah for Publishing Firmage Papers
I wrote this a while ago, pending further investigation. Decided to throw it out to juxtapose Can Gun Lobby Bribe Google?
On February 21st 2006, contributing author Professor Ed Firmage re-published the Nixon Impeachment Papers on OneUtah.
On that day and the next two, traffic to OneUtah dropped in half from the previous day. We went from an average of 500 unique visits to 75.
A bit of research revealed that all site referrals from Google had stopped.
OneUtah began publishing in January of 2006. Traffic had been climbing steadily until that day.
What happened? Any ideas?
I saved the Google Analytics Reports just in case…
Analytics_www.oneutah.org_20070121-20070221_(Referring - Google-Report).csv
Analytics_www.oneutah_20070121-20070221_(Referring-Google-Report).pdf
Analytics.oneutah_20070121-20070221_(ReferringSourcesReport).pdf
Analytics.oneutah__20070121-20070221_(TrafficSourcesReport).pdf
Analytics.oneutah__20070121-20070221_(VisitorTypesReport).pdf
Analytics.oneutah__20070212-20070305_(DashboardReport).pdf
Analytics.oneutah__20070224-20070324_(Referring-Google-Report).csv
Analytics.oneutah_20070224-20070324_(Referring-Google-Report).pdf
June 1st, 2008 at 12:35 am
I say impeach Bush on the last minute of his last day in office, or sooner, of course! As soon as we can put honorable people in office who care about the law we can start to craft laws that address the important concerns the internet brings with it. We shouldn’t have to wonder why things like this happen. There must be some oversight that insures true freedom of information and speech on these search engines.
With this congress, forget it!
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:09 am
You overestimate how much google cares about a site like oneutah. Odds are that something completely unrelated caused the change.
I run a few websites and see this sort of thing happens to my traffic more often than I would like (every few months at one point). Eventually the traffic comes back.
But to believe the anti-oneutah conspiracy theory that you’re touting here requires a considerable leap of logic.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:11 am
Larry:
Here is a quote from the Decider given 11/7/2000 in a speech titled “Why You Should Vote for Me”:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/ncguest3.htm
Read it. It’s an absolute hoot!!
PS. Maybe Bob S. or jd have a solution aside from impeachment!!
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:18 am
You may want to check Google Webmaster Tools to see if you’ve been added to the supplemental index. This is “purgatory” for pages that Google believes are duplicates of other sites or that have engaged in content theft. Sometimes cross-posting between other sites can cause pages to land in the supplemental index.
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Hi Adam,
I’ve looked at this thoroughly and spoken with a number of experts and I’ve done research into all the possible reasons as suggested herein. Thats one of the reasons I waited so long to post this.
Having explored, I think, all the possibilities I go back to why little ole OneUtah.org.
Then I consider the FBI infiltration of harmless Quaker groups and God knows what else. Recent experience tells us the Bush administration IS capable of such idiocy.
I should point out that Google won a huge contract from the NSA to build the biggest data storage center in the world on the vacant lot next to the NSA.
One must also assume someone at the NSA tracks the impeachment movement online.
So what SHOULD I think?
June 2nd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Serves you right for linking to google, maybe try dogpile next time.
June 2nd, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Albert O:
From the Bush article you linked to:
There has to be a stronger description of this then failure a to the tenth power.
Bush couldn’t have written that article, because it doesn’t say a thing about killing people. Whenever he tries to talk about doing things that help people, he gets his words mixed up and can’t form a sentence.
The whole article is quite astounding. Thanks for the link!
July 10th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
[...] It will be fun to watch the traffic grow back since the Google impeachment ban. [...]