China is a nation of strict censorship and the country has been rightfully dealt a wealth of criticism for this fact. As many of you know the Internet is carefully screened by China to ensure the proper ‘facts’ of life are fed to its people. So I wonder, what exactly does China consider worthy of censorship?

Does your website fall into China’s wastebasket?
The Great Firewall of China is a website that is designed to tell you if your website is blocked in China. Try it yourself and see if your website is a banned substance. Although it is not now, I expect that the StepForth SEO Blog will be banned very soon thanks to this posting.

Here is just a sampling of sites that are completely blocked in China:

  • Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com)
  • The New York Times (nytimes.com)
  • The BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk)
  • Amnesty International (amnesty.org)

I found other site examples but they were not always banned, it seems site-wide censorship may occur only at certain times or connectivity issues are to blame. The other possibility is China is providing a slightly kinder viewpoint for users of the greatfirewallofchina.org. After all, they are bound to have noted this site’s existence and heightened popularity.

– Thanks to Jeremy Zawodny’s blog for the heads up on the great wall website.

Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth SEO Services
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