As Google has risen to mammoth proportions of online influence, debate has raged for years about bias. When Google News launched, a pass through by their bots and a link up at a Google News site drove readers to traditional an non-traditional media.

And when those bots don’t show up, and that link isn’t there, news outlets experience precipitous drops in traffic that essential to their survival.

While other search engines like Topix are picking up the slack, the Google News cold shoulder is getting a lot of attention for a lot of reasons.

Is Google Purging Conservative News Sites? at Newsbusters looks at some of the known reasons a news site may be dropped.