I was reading about XSS exploits on Matt Cutts blog, and noticed a comment that has me wondering if Google isn’t automatically penalizing sites with ‘porn‘ either in a textual content, or in actual content.

What has me wondering is the way it was included in this particular paragraph:

If you’ve noticed that your rankings in Google seem to be affected, you might consider a few searches on your site to see if anyone has injected spammy or porn content on your site. If your domain was example.com, you might want to run a few queries such as [site:example.com porn] or [site:example.com biaxin] or [site:example.com viagra] to see whether you run across unexpected results. (source - Matt Cutts Blog)

Maybe I am just being paranoid.

But in reading how that is worded, it makes it seem that ‘porn‘ is not a good thing in Google, which would be really bad news for a lot of adult webmasters. I mean, like we don’t have enough headaches from Bush and the other wing nuts out there? Still, there has been a lot of speculation that ‘adult sites‘ that deal in ‘porn‘ are given some form of penalty or something, that some how effects their rankings.

Yet at the same time, adult sites do rank well for very specific terms. Some of them might be considered as being ‘porn only‘ terms, but there are lots of other words, for which adult sites rank well at. The only thing I have found, is that to get a higher Page Rank, just doesn’t seem in the cards for many Adult Orientated Sites.

So does Google penalize adult sites?

I suppose the answer depends on who you talk to. Somehow, if they do penalize us, they aren’t about to admit it. I mean that could be an interesting lawsuit, if some bright eyed lawyer wanted to take them on, but then again, the hard part would be to prove it. I personally think they do, but not as much as they could.

Now if that stupid XXX TLD ever became a fact, I think you would see Google and other search directories block all of us, which is just one of the many reasons why I oppose the XXX TLD.

Yet given how complex the Search Engines are, and how they determine a site’s ranking, I do think that certain words may indeed provide a trigger, that does harm our rankings. I think the obvious terms like ‘porn‘ are one of them, which is a bummer. I use it way too much, and I am really wondering, is it me, or is it all those nasty ‘porn video‘ or ‘porn star‘ words I use?

Posted on June 18th, 2008 by No Bull
Filed under: SEO Mysteries & Myths