[maeil]

And I'm tired of this sort of sloppy and inflammatory discrediting.

It fits 'shadowbanning' to an absolute tee. Without any kind of notification, or any recourse, a switch is flicked to "off" in a single moment, putting a domain on the shitlist. This is now very well documented, including by this post, and incredibly obvious from the graph.

[sceptic123]

Certainly not what I understand as shadowbanning.

> the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user

(from Wikipedia)

I'm not saying what they are doing is good, just agreeing that it doesn't seem like shadowbanning, it just looks like downranking.

[gorjusborg]

I doubt it is even a ban. It definitely isn't a shadowban.

A ban is when you are preventing from participating in something. Google is a service that indexes the internet and provides references to relevant information. Website providers aren't the users here, web searchers are. I guess you could argue that the site was 'banned' from search results, but I doubt that the author would care enough to search 100 pages of search results to see if they were still there, they just care that they aren't a first page hit.

A shadowban is when a participant has been banned, but has no idea it has happened. This came about on certain link aggregation/social media sites as a solution to people being banned and creating new accounts and resuming their behavior.