Natural News was not banned from Google over fake news

Natural News, a controversial alternative medicine website according to Wikipedia, has been delisted from Google. The news site themselves confirmed being removed from Google and recently claimed Google banned them because the site was pro-Trump.

Google has confirmed the site was not removed for its political views but rather because of a webmaster guidelines violation. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land:

We don’t comment on individual sites, but if we find that a site violates one or more of our Webmaster Guidelines we may take manual action against it. For webmasters who have questions about their own sites, our Webmaster team provides support through platforms such as the Webmaster Forums. Once a site has remedied the problem, the webmaster can submit the site for reconsideration.

Natural News said in its post that “Google sent no warning whatsoever to our ‘webmaster tools’ email address on file with them,” but not all penalties will receive a notification via Google Search Console. More extreme and deceptive violations will not receive such notifications.

While some are suggesting the ban is related to Google’s interest in tackling the web’s “fake news” problem, Google has nothing in its webmaster guidelines about such sites. Google would not penalize or delist a web site for “fake news,” let alone being controversial. (Even some who dislike Natural News aren’t sure it qualifies as fake news.)

Google has many penalties that can result in a site like Natural News being demoted or delisted but, like we said above, fake news is not one of them.

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