Likely this is not targeted at left wing websites, and they are just a convenient victim. I also believe there are other factors. Peoples news preferences are changing a lot lately, but also I believe this change by Googles algorithm is in partnership with establishment preferred media, to promote them, rather than to target either the left or the right. There’s nothing to indicate the left is specifically targeted here. Establishment media is promoting itself. Anti establishment media is being “censored” whether left or right. When Huffpo and Salon start getting affected, I’ll reconsider my conclusion.

Technically speaking as far as I can tell huffpo and salon aren't left, they're liberal. They don't actually support any anticapitialist policies, though they do support a number of liberal policies.

They are not liberal at all, they are socially progressive, which is leftist. Bill Maher, is a liberal.

I wasn't able to find any articles on Salon's page that were anti-corporate, or pro-social programs. I'm pretty sure they're liberal my dude. Leftist thought is strictly around the economic axis and has nothing to do with "progressive".

> Leftist thought is strictly around the economic axis and has nothing to do with "progressive".

That's a narrow and ahistorical view of Leftism. It's true that modern progressivism is not the same as leftism, but the two are not unrelated (and overlap.)

Sure but at least in American politics that's really the rift in the democratic party, Liberal or Left. Meaning identity focused politics vs economic focused politics. Salon and The Hill and Mother Jones in this divide are all predominately liberal.

> Sure but at least in American politics that's really the rift in the democratic party, Liberal or Left. Meaning identity focused politics vs economic focused politics.

No, that's almost completely wrong. Being extremely generous, it could be interpreted to only slightly misstate something that was approximately true in the early 1990s, at the height of the “neoliberal consensus”. At that time, the difference between the (dominant, from Bill Clinton on) neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party and the then-dominant faction of the Republican Party was largely over issues of rights of disadvantaged identity groups (though it must be noted that this was primarily about economic rights, so it is still about the economy) whereas the difference between the progressive wing of the Democratic party and the dominant faction of the Republican Party was more over issues of economic class and structure. (Note that even then, provision of healthcare access was an exception to this, as an economic but not identity-group issue on which both major factions of the Democratic Party differed from then dominant faction of the Republican Party.)

However, that is not because the neoliberal wing is less focussed on economics (neoliberalism, after all, is a label that applies to an economic policy orientation), and with neoliberal economics no longer dominant in the Republican Party, both Democratic factions differ from the dominant faction of the opposing party on core economic issues.

Note that I use “neoliberal” and “progressive” rather than “liberal” and “left” because “liberal" is heavily overloaded in US politics, and the center of mass of the two wings are basically center-right (neoliberal) and somewhere between center and center-left (progressive); there's essentially no substantial true Leftist faction in the Democratic Party.

As far as the outlets you list, Mother Jones is mostly associated with the progressive wing of the party, though that’s far from a perfect alignment; I'd agree that the other two, insofar as they align with either Democratic faction, tend to be more in line with the neoliberal faction.

The Jacobin would be a leftist magazine, Mother Jones would be a liberal one.

Negative SEO?

If well funded right wing players invested time and effort to degrade the rank of popular left wing sites, would they have a significant effect on Google rankings?

Doubt it. It’s not left vs right. It’s establishment media trying to force itself back into relevancy.

Just how reliable are a lot of these websites?

They’re all antiestablishment, independent players. The “Vox Day”, “infowars”, “dailymail”, and “Drudge Report” of the left. It has nothing to do with the left and everything to do with anti-establishment, whether left or right.

Is search traffic dropping for “Vox Day”, “infowars”, “dailymail”, and “Drudge Report” also then?

Since April/May, infowars organic traffic from google.com dropped from just below 1 million down to just above 500k.

Breitbart.com is down almost a million since April from almost 3 million.

The other sites mentioned are pretty mainstream with the right now, in a “too big to fall” kinda way, except voxday.blogspot.com but according to semrush, every single one of them have seen declines in organic traffic since April/May.

If you look very far to the right, Daily Stormer is outright banned from Google, and Godaddy.

Thanks for the extra context, much appreciated.