This article is reprinted from Bill Dembski, design theorist William Dembski’s Substack, with his permission.

Around the same time that it was destroying the online CBD oil industry, Google was also attempting to destroy the online alternative health industry. I was tempted to write “decimate” the online alternative health industry, but the old Roman practice of decimation referred to killing only one-tenth of an unruly band of Roman soldiers.

Google never simply decimates unruly websites in this sense — that’s too mild for its tastes. It knows that it has done its job right when it destroys at least ninety percent of a website’s business. This calls for a neologism. I propose nonaginate (from nonaginta, Latin for 90, indicating 90 percent; emphasis is on the first syllable). Nonaginate — hat tip to Google for inspiring the term — is thus defined as destroying at least ninety percent of a thing. Nonagination is therefore much more extreme than decimation (in decimation’s strict literal sense of only destroying ten percent). Google prefers to nonaginate sites it doesn’t like. Thus, for instance, in the alternative health space, when Google decided to go after it, it reduced organic traffic to the website of one of the key players, Dr. Joseph Mercola, by 99 percent!

Image Credit: irissca - Adobe Stock

How, you might ask, does Google justify downranking alternative health sites? Rather than simply admit its own bias, it institutes what it claims to be an unbiased policy. It’s the old trick of using a policy to do your dirty work, thereby leaving your hands ostensibly clean. Google uses policy as a fig leaf to cover its bias. Thus it will impose EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content standards. According to Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, content that can affect a person’s health, financial stability, or safety—like medical advice—falls under YMYL and thus must come from sources that demonstrate strong EAT.

Because many alternative health websites, even when backed by formal medical credentials (such as Joseph Mercola’s site—Mercola is an MD), fly in the face of conventional medical wisdom, Google’s algorithms and human raters are thus, in the name of EAT and YMYL, instructed to treat them as less trustworthy or potentially harmful. Invoking policy in this way allows Google to position its suppression of such content as a matter of user protection rather than viewpoint discrimination. Google’s bias here is as real as ever, only Google has deflected it to an impersonal policy that gives an air of objectivity.

In any case, for online businesses that Google has yet to nonaginate and that want to continue to play the SEO game with Google, there are SEO/PR firms designed to get websites and webpages to rank highly with Google. (As an aside, these firms are themselves now hurting because of Google’s draconian updates, which make it harder and harder for them to help clients get and stay profitable.) A prime approach that SEO/PR firms take to help online businesses with Google is to get complimentary articles written about a website and company, and then place these articles with publications that have high domain authority. Domain authority, or domain ranking (DR), is measured by numbers from 0 to 100, 100 being best, and 90 being terrific (unsurprisingly, Google.com’s domain authority is 100).

Articles with links from high domain authority websites to your website are then supposed get you kudos with Google. These articles need not result from objective journalists taking a sincere interest in your website. This is pay to play. Thus, the SEO/PR firms, the article authors, and the newsie sites with high domain authority that host the articles all need to get paid. You can expect to pay $3,000 to $5,000 (or more) for such an article in a publication with a domain ranking at or just under 90.

Interestingly, having enough of these paid articles can help get your website/company an entry in Wikipedia. That can be very useful for your enterprise because having a Wikipedia entry gets you instant credibility (even though so much of Wikipedia is substandard and politically biased). Also, Google will take the first sentence or two of your Wikipedia entry and turn it into a knowledge panel, so that a line from Wikipedia will be the first thing people see about your website/company when they do a search for it. If all of this sounds incestuous, it is. As noted, Wikipedia has a long-standing incestuous relationship with Google. If you query some controversial topic, what Google reports about it in some AI generated knowledge statement and what Wikipedia reports about it will typically align.

But wait, there’s more. Google’s inordinate control over online businesses is matched by its inordinate control over and ability to manipulate public opinion. Let’s turn to that next.

Next: How Google can control and manipulate public opinion

Here are the previous instalments: The evilization of Google—and what to do about it Part 1: Understanding Google’s dominance over the internet. Nothing is totally evil. Still, there’s enough evil in Google that it is, for now, more on the side of Darth Vader than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The utter dependence of online businesses on Google. Part 2: An SEO business needs to please Google or else it is dead in the water. Google’s re-presentation of information created by others makes it less likely that users will visit them. Thus Google’s business expands at their expense.

A potential chink in Google’s armor: Loss of legal immunity Part 3: Currently, Google is legally protected from the consequences of frequent copyright violation. One outcome of the resulting ad clutter is that, unless you are top of the search, you’re likely wasting time trying to make money off organic search.

Becoming a slave to Google: How it happens Part 4: After an update, you always have to second guess what Google did. You become a reverse engineer who never sees under the hood. This leads to a mentality that always tries to second guess whether Google will favor some piece of content or way of expressing it.

and

Google’s power over online business: Monopolistic and extravagant Part 5: To help people understand Google’s power over online businesses, I ask. What if the road on which the local Walmart is located suddenly became a dirt trail? It’s as though Google is doing everything in its power to throttle organic traffic, driving that traffic to their sponsored ads, increasing its bottom line.