Google invited some of the most vocal independent site owners who’ve been shadowbanned by their brutal updates of the last two years, and 20 of them came to pay their respects. We had no idea what the purpose of our visit was going in, but we knew by the time we left.

We weren’t allowed into the large, high-security building where Danny held his Creator Event until we’d been given not one but two visitor badges and affixed them to our clothes. After they were handed to us, these were never looked at or checked. There was no one around to check them.

We spent the morning politely answering questions from Google, questions designed to help Google improve its search engine, questions that in no way benefited any of the shadowbanned attendees. After, we were given a chance (we thought) to get something useful out of the trip. We split into small breakout groups divided up by category.

During this small group discussion, I and others tried to get our Googlers to address the biggest problem facing our industry: Google giving big brands special treatment. Each time a site owner brought up the topic, we were quickly steered in another direction.

I kept pushing, and eventually, our Googler (whose name I’m not allowed to tell you) wrote “diversity of results” at the top of the whiteboard he was using, as if to signify I should shut up and move on. Instead of addressing the only topic that matters, I was asked to explain how YouTube works because, somehow, none of the four Googlers assigned to our group knew anything about it.

When our group session was over, I left the room for a break. While I was gone, “diversity of results” was erased from the top of the whiteboard and rewritten at the bottom, in much tinier lettering.

Undeterred, we then asked the only question that mattered: Why has Google shadowbanned our sites? Google’s Chief Search Scientist answered this question using a strategy based around gaslighting and said they hadn’t. Google doesn’t ever derank an entire site, only individual pages, he said. There is no site-wide classifier. He insisted it is only done at the page level.

Many of the shadowbanned site owners attempted to politely push back and point out that the reason all 20 of us were there was specifically because our entire site was deranked from Google in a single night.

Finally, someone bluntly asked, since nothing is wrong with our sites, how do we recover?

Google’s elderly Chief Search Scientist answered, without an ounce of pity or concern, that there would be updates but he didn’t know when they’d happen or what they’d do. Further questions on the subject were met with indifference as if he didn’t understand why we cared.

bla bla bla Google is dead

I tried to trim as much fat as possible without putting too much effort in.