Following Media Guido’s revelation that Buzzfeed deleted a negative article about the board game Monopoly just a month after entering a lucrative sponsored content deal with Monopoly’s owner Hasbro, Techno Guido can report that Buzzfeed inserted computer code into their website that forced Google and Wayback Machine into hiding the deleted article from their cache:

This stops people from viewing an article critical of one its sponsored content ‘collaborators’ and even prevents people who search for the article to see that it existed.

Google cache and Wayback Machine are digital archives of the web that can be used to find web pages that are no longer available.

Tom Chivers’ Monopoly article is the only one of Buzzfeed’s deleted articles that has been blocked from Google in this way, the other article mentioned above has not been deleted. It’s always the cover up that gets you.

UPDATE: Matthew Ingram points out that removing an entire post is explicitly forbidden in BuzzFeed’s ponderous code of conduct: