I am going to weigh in here as someone that spends all day living and breathing Google. I only obsess over two things — SEO, and heavy metal.

Most of the time, sites are demoted or “filtered” in Google algorithmically. “Penguin,” “Panda,” and most recently “Fred” are known examples. There are trillions of pages on the net, so it’s impossible to manually review all of them.

Occasionally, a site will be reported or flagged as “needing review,” which adds it to the queue for manual review. This is how these contractors identify PBNs (private blog networks) and other “fake” sites, for anyone familiar with black hat.

They are trained, through documents like this, to learn how to spot low quality sites. These documents have been leaked in the past, in full.

My assessment of what I see here is as follows:

1. This document is possibly fake, and even propaganda. It would be easy as hell to forge this. It’s unlikely, but I have to be fair and balanced here. The document is simply saying “look for sites like this.”
2. Just because InfoWars is listed as an “example” site, does not mean it is actually filtered in the live search results. The only way to know this is to find a noticeable dip in traffic through analytics. If analytics remain strong, or at least average and typical of the time period, then there may not be any sort of filter on the site.
3. People link to InfoWars all the time. The site probably gets a ton of social traffic. This is one way Google validates the “quality” of the site, whether it’s BS content or not. Think about how many stories are out there, “Kim Kardashian tripped on a rock today…” This is “low quality” but likely not “penalized.” There is a difference.
4. If InfoWars breaks a story first, and it’s not listed at the top of search, this would be a flag in my eyes. Someone with a trained eye would need to identify the performance of InfoWars in the SERPs (search engine results page).
5. I have called it out countless times — InfoWars.com is not using the most up-to-date Google recommended guidelines for a news site. CNN, Fox, etc. all are using proper structured data which gives them a huge advantage, especially on mobile search. I have pinged Cernovich, Alex, Lee Ann, David, Owen, all about this. I am just some heavy metal dude with 100 followers so no one gives a damn. Totally understandable. I’m telling you, InfoWars is not playing with a full deck.

tl;dr

This document does not prove that InfoWars is demoted in the search results. It could be, but one would need to evaluate traffic patterns.

InfoWars is not using industry standard best practices and news related structured data. FACT. I can see it in the code of the site.