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> But this doesn't seem to account for the site being completely delisted from Google on such searches as "polygraph" and "lie detector."

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.

What search term(s) did you use, and on what page of results did AntiPolygraph.org appear?

The google search "beat a polygraph" gives antipolygraph.org as result number 10.

The google search "pass a polygraph" gives antipolygraph.org as result number 11.

The google search "polygraph" give antipolygraph.org as result number 188.

The markup rules were downgraded years ago. No h1 or title or meta tags shouldn't be the primary cause. Probably more to do with https, mobile and amp than the above factors.

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.

> 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

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.

But isn't the reason that the exact ranking algorithms and factors are not public mostly to prevent people from gaming the system? If the exact formula for being the best ranked result would be public every seo-spam site would adapt to them too and everything becomes irrelevant again.

> I am not familiar with any other instances of such partial delisting by Google. Are you?

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...

[1] https://search.google.com/search-console

It has been a few years now that AntiPolygraph.org's Google ranking on the search term "polygraph" would vary between the first, second, and third page of results. We noticed the complete delisting on "polygraph" early this year. As observed in the United States and several other countries, a Google search on "polygraph" will return no results at all from AntiPolygraph.org, whether or the 1st page or the 30th.

Hmm, I tried from Australia, and your home page did show up on a search for "polygraph" on Google, but you're result #164. There were other sites opposed to polygraphs ahead of you - Polygraph.com was on page 7, while there was a YouTube video at the top of page 2, and some NY Times & Smithsonian Magazine articles about "how to beat a polygraph test" on Page 3 and Page 8 respectively.

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...

Thank you for the time you took to research this question and for sharing your findings and thoughts on this! Yours is the most helpful reply I've received.

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?

Yikes, it does appear Google stopped showing your page in most results for that keyword. (Hey, at least they've confirmed it!)

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.

The same happened to me, right around the end of February/beginning of March. A website of mine which was consistently in the top 2 results for certain queries for the past 4+ years and is the most relevant result for that query abruptly disappeared entirely. It's got modern HTML/CSS, is responsive, and uses HTTPS. It has frequent activity (it's a community) and so is constantly updated.

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.

Your website is the first result for "antipolygraph" and the third for "polygraph countermeasures", so it's a little difficult to take seriously a claim of a targeted "partial delisting" because your website doesn't perform so well for a primary search term (which yields a series of results from sources which are mobile friendly and have better SEO, most of which are critical of polygraphs and several of which also purport to include information on how to defeat them)