As you'll see in this recent post announcing the leak of the U.S. government's polygraph school's documentation about polygraph countermeasures, the federal polygraph community considers AntiPolygraph.org to be a major threat, and it features front and center in their training:
https://antipolygraph.org/blog/2018/06/09/ncca-polygraph-cou...
None of this necessarily entails any state influence in Google's action to delist AntiPolygraph.org on certain key search terms.
It is true that our web design is dated. But this doesn't seem to account for the site being completely delisted from Google on such searches as "polygraph" and "lie detector."
I am not familiar with any other instances of such partial delisting by Google. Are you? If so, what were the causes for that?
It's not delisted, it's just not on the first page as other users also reported and I just verified myself.
With every change of the ranking algorithm there's a bunch of sites going up or down and nobody can tell you the exact reason why - it's easy to just call it censorship but in reality it's probably something else. Like the top comment already explained that your site markup has a bunch of missing information that makes it hard for search engines to properly scrape you.
The google search "pass a polygraph" gives antipolygraph.org as result number 11.
The google search "polygraph" give antipolygraph.org as result number 188.
Google has no problem scraping html pages and getting importance and content topics from inbound links, social media links and the actual text on the page.
And that is a problem. No company with as much influence on the web as Google has should be able to hide behind a phrase such as "it's just the algorithm". "De-rank every web site with the word humuhumunukunukuapua’a" is an algorithm too.
Every ranking should have a very clear reason, and legitimate web sites (yes, this is a judgement call, but a site with a history like this one would qualify) should have access to that reasoning behind their ranking.
I've been experiencing partial delisting on my own website over the last 3 months. Google Search Console [1] shows they now exclude 25% of my website from the index. Search Console lists those pages as "Crawled - currently not indexed".
Mine is also an old site (nearly 20 years old), but it already used CSS & XHTML, and I'd been updating it to HTML 5, mobile friendly & responsive design & implemented HTTPS. I hadn't been adding new pages / content, though.
When did your Google traffic start declining? My Google traffic started taking a hit around March 9, and there was apparently a "Core Algorithm Update" on March 7:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-confirms-core-update-253...
Supposedly the March algorithm update was about query relevance [1], and maybe your site just isn't the most relevant for a very general search like "polygraph". My site used to be on page 2 for "Photoshop Plugins", but after the March update it crashed to page 5 (according to Search Console). Since my site isn't about every Photoshop plugin, just the ones I make myself, perhaps that's fair.
I'd definitely recommend playing with the new Google Search Console Beta - you can do a search on the specific "polygraph" keyword, and it will show you what your site's Google rankings were for that keyword over the last 16 months. Click on Performance in the left menu, set Date to Last 16 Months, then add +New -> Queries -> Query Is Exactly -> polygraph. My guess is you'll see a big drop on March 7 / 9. Also worth checking to see what your Click-Through-Rate is.
[1] https://www.mariehaynes.com/march-9-2018-google-algorithm-up...
If I interpret things correctly, the Google Search Console Beta suggests that the situation is worse than I imagined. I have taken a screen shot that you can view here:
https://antipolygraph.org/graphics/google-search-console-ap-...
As you'll note, over the past 16 months, Google reports 147,000 impressions for the search word "polygraph," with an average position of 8.4, but only 381 total clicks. And the number of impressions and clicks flatlined somewhere around March. What do you make of this?
If you now click where it says Average Position, you'll get a purple chart of your average position/ranking for that specific keyword over time. (You can actually click on each of those boxes to turn the graphs on & off.) In my case, some of my keywords have a very obvious & sharp drop in ranking beginning around March 7 / 9. My guess is you'll see something similar.
If I'm right about the March Google update, then there isn't anything wrong with your site. It's just that people aren't clicking on your site when they search for "polygraph" (0.3% CTR is rather low, as you can see compared to your other keywords) or Google feels your page isn't the most relevant to their query. You could try making a page on your site focused specifically on that keyword, but you'd be fighting against Wikipedia & Merriam-Webster for the niche.
Looking at the indexed pages, it seems to be stuck in some sort of strange limbo where half the time the homepage isn't even indexed, then it shows up again, then it's gone, back and forth endlessly for the past few months. It never appears in most Google results anymore unless I get very specific (like searching for the name of the website word for word).
I'm at a loss for what to try next. Traffic has dropped to 1/6th of what it was before.
[0]: https://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf
And something is lost there. Now all our sites are bloated with a shit-ton of Javascript. I turn Javascript off by default and are surprised by how many blank pages I get. (If it's a news site, I use archive.is instead of enabling it). Square Space sites don't load most images without Javascript.
Are you basing this on how truthy the web design looks, or some aspect of the content?