December 28th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Google Hates Sex Blogs Now
If you’re one of the many people who used to find ErosBlog by typing “sex blog” into Google, here’s some information on why it doesn’t work so well now. This has actually been going on for a couple of weeks, but it’s been getting better lately; this morning for the first time ErosBlog is actually back on the first page for that search, albeit low (we used to be number one).
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=1837
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=1837
I’d noticed the drop-off in traffic from Google and thought it was just us. Seems to be pretty much back to normal now, though.
You know I just did a search on google using my blog title, “Desireous” and my actual Desireous blog didn’t even appear in the listings on the first or second page (I didn’t look any further than that) How odd! It brought up my profile and my other blogs and it brought up other blogs that link to me but it didn’t bring up my blog which it always used to. Very very interesting.
Hugs
Des
You and me both, baby. I’m stuck out in that Google gulag. The sucking sound is near deafening.
kissykiss,
chelsea girl
We are getting killed too dude! Site is looking better than ever, and google is trashing us :/
Those Bastards!
BoingBoing has some good info:
http://www.boin....html
But they’re saying it’s mostly fixed, which it sure ain’t (see chelsea girl’s blog for some details).
With google’s deaf ear, it’s unclear if it’s any use to complain; it isn’t the first time I’ve seen ’em do this, either.
My traffic’s dropped too… *cries*
And since Blogger is now a google product, does that mean they’re montioring and could potentially take the blogger writers down?
I’ve been thinking of you ever since I got a call from Babeland a few weeks ago about this. You sound so calm; I’ve just been livid. What do you think is going on? xoxoxox susie
Susie, I’m not a search engine optimization guy; I’ve always followed the Google advice of just writing a good site and trusting that the search engines will like it.
So much for doing the right thing.
With that disclaimer, my theory: Sex spam sites use adult keywords hundreds of times to rank well in search engines. (It’s much more complicated, but every strategy involves the necessary keywords.) On the other hand, an adult blog uses those same keywords tens of thousands of time over multiple years. So when Google devises a spiffy new algorithm to attack the spam blogs, they penalize sites with the adult keywords — but they tuned it wrong, and it hit hardest the sites with the most volume of those keywords.
So that killed a few of the stupid obvious spam sites with tens of thousands of stacked keywords, then it killed us, but it petered out before hurting the vast majority of spam blogs, which are quick “throw against wall and see what sticks” efforts using the keywords mere hundreds of times.
That’s my guess, and it’s just a guess.
Problem is, Google may not care — it’s unclear if they consider *any* adult site a desireable element in their search listings.
ErosBlog is currently showing as the #1 result for “sex blog” for me. Looks like they’re continuing to tweak the results. :)
I’ve often been surprised as to how much difference Google rankings make. One part of my site went from an average of 150 visits per day to an average of 50 after it was demoted in Google’s results. :)
Ohohoh….but you’re back @ number ONE!! Yippee (Thank goodness….)