[snopercod]

If there's no payola going on, then why did google.com stop indexing FreeRepublic last February?

Before that, you could append "site:www.freerepublic.com" to any search and find hundreds or thousands of articles here. You could search for your screen name and find everything that you had ever posted since the beginning of FR.

After the first week in February, the same search that returned 1000 hits the week before returned only 1 or 2, or maybe none.

(I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the Washington Post is a paying subscriber to google.)

[Libertarian_4_eva]

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the Washington Post is a paying subscriber to google.

I think it had to do with the fact that someone posted a story on FR about how a man who owned a gunstore and sold other products wanted to get a paid listing for those other products "not firearms".

Google stated that because they also had guns on that website they would not list it because they do not allow paid ads for websites with guns on them even if they do not want to buy ads for the gun section of the website.

It also is quite funny that the first five results for handgun have websites that are against firearms.... infact most of the firstpage consists of websites that are anti second admendment.

The Freeping that google got I think has more to do with it then the washington post.