Search Risk – How Google Almost Killed ProtonMail

[Razer]

In the past two months, many of you have reached out to us to ask about
the mysterious tweets we sent to Google in August. At ProtonMail,
transparency is a core value, and we try to be as transparent with our
community as possible. As many people have continued to point out to us,
we need to be more transparent here to avoid continued confusion and
speculation. Thus, we are telling the full story today to clarify what
happened.

What Happened?

The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding
ProtonMail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and
‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because ProtonMail has
long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.

When ProtonMail launched in Beta back in May 2014, our community rapidly
grew as people from around the world came together and supported us in
our mission to protect privacy in the digital age. Our record breaking
crowdfunding campaign raised over half a million dollars from
contributors and provided us with the resources to make ProtonMail
competitive against even the biggest players in the email space.

By the summer of 2015, ProtonMail passed half a million users and was
the world’s most well known secure email service. ProtonMail was also
ranking well in Google search at this time, on the first or second page
of most queries including “encrypted email” and “secure email”. However,
by the end of October 2015, the situation had changed dramatically, and
ProtonMail was mysteriously no longer showing up for searches of our two
main keywords.

Between the beginning of the summer and the fall of 2015, ProtonMail did
undergo a lot of changes. We released ProtonMail 2.0, we went fully open
source, we launched mobile apps in beta, and we updated our website,
changing our TLD from .ch to the more widely known .com. We also doubled
in size, growing to nearly 1 million users by the fall. All of these
changes should have helped ProtonMail’s search rankings as we became
more and more relevant to more people.

In November 2015, we became aware of the problem and consulted a number
of well known SEO experts. None of them could explain the issue,
especially since ProtonMail has never used any blackhat SEO tactics, nor
did we observe any used against us. Mysteriously, the issue was entirely
limited to Google, as this anomaly was not seen on any other search
engine. Below are the search rankings for ProtonMail for ‘secure email’
and ‘encrypted email’ taken at the beginning of August 2016 across all
major search engines. We rank on either page 1 or 2 everywhere except
Google where we are not ranked at all.

image: protonmail seo rankings

All throughout Spring 2016, we worked in earnest to get in touch with
Google. We created two tickets on their web spam report form explaining
the situation. We even contacted Google’s President EMEA Strategic
Relationships, but received no response nor improvement. Around this
time, we also heard about the anti-trust action brought forward by the
European Commission against Google, accusing Google of abusing its
search monopoly to lower the search rankings of Google competitors. This
was worrying news, because as an email service that puts user privacy
first, we are the leading alternative to Gmail for those looking for
better data privacy.

In August, with no other options, we turned to Twitter to press our
case. This time though, we finally got a response, thanks in large part
to the hundreds of ProtonMail users who drew attention to the issue and
made it impossible to ignore. After a few days, Google informed us that
they had “fixed something” without providing further details. The
results could be immediately seen.

image: google protonmail search risk

ProtonMail Google Search Ranking for “Encrypted Email”

In the above plots, the x-axis is time and the y-axis is search ranking
(lower number is better). The dates where there are no data points are
times when we are not ranked at all by Google. After Google made some
changes, ProtonMail’s rankings immediately recovered and are now ranked
#1 and #3 for ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’ respectively. Without
any additional explanation from Google, we may never know why ProtonMail
become unranked. In any case, we do appreciate Google finally taking
action to resolve the issue, we just wished it happened sooner.

The Danger of Search Risk

This incident however highlights a previously unrecognized danger that
we are now calling Search Risk. The danger is that any service such as
ProtonMail can easily be suppressed by either search companies, or the
governments that control those search companies. This can happen even
across national borders. For example, even though Google is an American
company, it controls over 90% of European search traffic. In this case,
Google directly caused ProtonMail’s growth rate worldwide to be reduced
by over 25% for over 10 months.

This meant that ProtonMail’s income from users was also cut by 25%,
putting financial pressure on our operations. We went from being able to
cover all our monthly expenses to having to draw from our emergency
reserve fund. The lost income and financial damage incurred as a result
was several hundred thousand Swiss Francs (1 CHF = 1.01 USD), which will
never be reimbursed.

The only reason we survived to tell this story is because the majority
of ProtonMail’s growth comes from word of mouth, and our community is
too loud to be ignored. Many other companies won’t be so fortunate. This
episode illustrates that Search Risk is serious, which is why we now
agree with the European Commission that given Google’s dominant position
in search, more transparency and oversight is critical.

Links images and a bit more: https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/