Search, PPC, Performance, Social, Turkey

Turkey bans Google - myths and truths

The Google ban in Turkey was headlined on most of the IT portals at the end of last week, the beginning of this week. Some of the news sources, like Mashable tried to crowdsource the info collecting process on their FB page (“If you’re from Turkey, we’d appreciate any updates on the blockade!”), so they could build up their coverage on that quite well.

Some other portals said that even Google, the search engine is being blocked or they added Facebook to the list.

Being in Turkey this is what I experienced (although some other users could have different experiences):

First Google Translate went off, then on the next day, some other Google services like Docs became unavailable. (Google, Gmail, Google AdWords, Facebook worked well, but Google Analytics became much slower.)

Meanwhile, YouTube - which has been banned since 2007 also worked well (as it was a pure DNS based ban, changing to Google DNS or Open DNS easily solved the problem). YouTube had around 6 million unique visitors per month from Turkey, seemingly all of them used the same trick as even the prime minister told so in front of the public.

Techcrunch came out with the info that the ban was not becuse of a decision made by one of the the government offices, but as they put the original YouTube ban into a higher ‘level’ (onto IP ranges), they just eventually stopped a lot of other services. We found the original news from the goverment officials saying almost nothing.

Access to services started to become normal again today. And yes, YouTube is absolutely off, only a VPN could help.

Actually, I have to add that life without Google Translate or having access to my Google Docs is hard. Not unimaginably, but I had to spend a lot of time unnecessarily on translations or recollecting my documents. I was definitely not happy with that.

Meanwhile, some of my Clients had to remove Google Analytics codes from their slowed-down websites and some of them removed Google AdWords tracking codes as well just in case. It’s definitely a loss to the whole industry, not just Google.

Another myth that the ban is because of Islam. No, it has nothing to do with that. The original YouTube ban was put up because of some ‘insulting’ videos of Atatürk, the founder of the republic. (As I heard the video played disco music toghether with Atatürk and that’s an insult as of the Turkish government ‘standards’.

Another rumour says that after Google offered to limit access to certain ‘offending’ videos in Turkey in return to forget the ban. The goverment said that it is not enough, because as Turkish people go abroad and there they still can be insulted with these. So, they said Google should delete them, no compromise.

Some other sources say that this dramatic change in lifting the bans of YouTube is because of the Gaza Flottilla videos. “On the 3rd of June three most viewed videos on YouTube contained documented footage of the aforementioned events, invalidating Turkish allegations. On the 4th of June, YouTube site was banned in Turkey.”

Hmm. I can imagine that.

Turkish Digital Agencies are protesting against the bans by putting a protesting  text onto their homepages. Another 6500 websites are now being banned in Turkey, this site has a huge list of them, the reasons vary.