You might remember the incident last year when a Google update essentially shadow banned all health websites not owned by billion dollar corporations.
Without anyone noticing, they stopped showing the results of hundreds, if not thousands, of non-institutional health websites — some of them quite reputable and well-established.
In a nutshell, Google has stopped showing you the information that you want to see. Instead, Google is taking it on themselves to decide what health information you are allowed to see.
This censorship has come in the form of Google deliberately placing a systematic penalty on the vast majority of health sites to make sure that they don’t show up on the first page of search results. This includes SelfHacked, our flagship website where we have been providing information on natural, science-based health topics for many years.
If you haven’t already heard about this, you’re probably thinking that I sound crazy, but if you don’t believe me, just look up the terms “natural cancer treatments” in Google and Bing. Check out the difference in the types of results that you see on the first page.
Or you can try to do a Google search for any other health information, and look at which websites show up on the first page – websites owned by big corporations, usually aligned or partnered with pharmaceutical companies. Google (Alphabet) itself has a pharmaceutical division.
The Problem with Google’s “Thought Policing”
Some people might say that Google is a private company and they can run their search engine however they want. That may be true, except for the lack of transparency from Google about what they are doing.
Google has been pretending like there’s an algorithm that is fair and anyone can rank so long as their content is high quality. This used to be true, but not anymore.
Most people don’t use Google thinking that they are taking sides in a debate or suppressing thousands of health websites because they don’t align with Google’s ideology — they see it as a tool or medium to find information.
Users don’t see it as Google’s job to tell you what you should be looking for, or what you should or shouldn’t be allowed to know about. Searchers want Google to give them the information they are seeking.
Google is being dishonest by pretending to be an unbiased medium — but in actuality, they are pushing their agenda and ideology onto people.
Now, if people are “cheating” and using “black-hat” SEO tricks to inflate their rankings, then I completely understand why those sites should be penalized. But we followed all of the rules, and we’re still being censored.
All of our content is backed by science, written by scientists and reviewed by medical professionals. Despite this, we were penalized and have not recovered despite our best efforts to comply with Google’s rule book. There hasn’t been any other independent health website that has recovered either.
New Direction For SelfHacked
Unfortunately, Google’s actions have caused a ripple effect for many companies. As you can imagine, curating the best health content backed by scientific references throughout each article takes a lot of effort from an entire team of people.
I’ve heard from many other independent health influencers and websites that they are struggling because of the censorship.
The vast majority of traffic to health websites run through Google (90%). Without that source of traffic, there is no way to break even on costs.
But despite the nefarious efforts to silence independent health websites, we can see that people still need the content that SelfHacked provides.
Every day we still get messages from readers telling us about how helpful an article has been and people continue to reach out asking us to write new articles on various health-related topics.
That’s why we’ve made a commitment to make sure that SelfHacked continues to be available as a resource, but something has to change.
The only way we can be an independent publisher that is faithful to the science and not reliant on Google’s agenda is to implement a premium subscription service. We’ve put this off for as long as possible, but it’s clear now that now this is the best way to continue to serve our customers in this age of censorship.
Very soon, SelfHacked articles will only be available to people who have signed up as members.
But, we always want to provide the most valuable and helpful products to our community and that’s why we’re including access to SelfHacked with our genetic and lab test analysis tool, SelfDecode, at no extra cost.
Subscribers will have access to:
- ALL SelfHacked articles (ad-free!) – Read from over 1500 science-based health articles that go in-depth on the benefits of natural supplement and lifestyle health changes.
- SelfDecode Personalized Genetics Blog – 400 personalized genetics articles help you get to the root cause of your health issue using your unique DNA.
- Personalized DNA Wellness Reports – in depth genetic reports on topics like gut health, thyroid, mood, longevity, sleep that provide you with recommendations specific for your body, so that you can solve any health problem you’re experiencing.
- Lab Test Analyzer tool – Upload your lab results and discover how you can get your levels to the optimal range. We analyze ~1000 labs. We will add any lab that we don’t have!
- and so much more!
You can get all of these with one single SelfDecode subscription, for ONLY $8/month (billed annually).
We would’ve been charging this for each individual subscription, but I told my team that I wanted to give the most value to our community at the lowest cost.
The combination of SelfDecode with SelfHacked and LabTestAnalyzer is the best resource for improving and optimizing your health.
Health practitioners are also huge fans of these tools and they’ve been giving us great reviews. If you’re a health practitioner and want to learn more about all the tools we have added recently, schedule your free demo tour here.
This change is coming in less than 72 HOURS.
If you’re one of the first 50 people to join before we launch the change, we will write an article about any health topic that you want and publish it on SelfHacked or SelfDecode (if it’s a genetic topic). Just forward your receipt after signing up to [email protected] with your topic and we’ll pass it along to our science writers!
Sign up for SelfDecode today to lock in unlimited access to SelfHacked and get access to all the tools you need to fully optimize your health. You can get everything that we’ve created over the past 6 years, for $8/month (billed annually)!
Let’s show Google that we will be in control of the health information we consume, despite their efforts to silence us.
When you support SelfDecode, you aren’t just getting access to the information you need to improve your own health, you are helping to ensure that the entire world will continue to have access to natural, holistic and science-based health information for many years to come.
