Chronicle writer disappears in porn clampdown

[gonzo]

The personal blog of San Francisco's Violet Blue, a sex writer published in the San Francisco Chronicle and Valleywag's sister site, has been removed from the Google index, along with several other adult sites. Tiny Nibbles, which runs a well-known annual list of the year's sexiest geeks, does not show in Google's search results, even if filters are turned off. Other sites affected include ErosBlog, a sex news site, and Comstock Films, which makes adult movies of real-life couples. The content's all legal, and naughty, rather than degrading. Some word Violet wrote probably triggered a Google ban, inadvertently, but the search engine's rules are opaque, as is the procedure for an appeal against deletion.

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BrianVansays:

They haven't been completely removed, but effectively that's what the index did to them. It's called the -30 penalty, and it forces the index to put the result for your site against certain keywords 30 results down the list from where it should have been (which means that if you are the first relevant result for a search, you'll end up on the fourth page of results). It's a penalty not for adult content, but for aggressive SEO and search cheats. No one is exactly sure how Google's algorithms calculate SEO fraud to apply such a penalty, but it seems that in mid-December they added a few adult-oriented keyword combinations to the SEO fraud list and tweaked it a bit too far... now a bunch of legitimate businesses (that are not using fraudulent SEO) are off the index.

Given the nature of the company (Google does not like to alienate entire industries like this... they're very fair about most of their decisions), it's a goofy mistake that will probably be corrected as soon as it's brought to their attention.


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[LAJ]

Interesting... I "met" her thru Darklady... I'll have to see what she knows.

[gonzo]

Originally Posted by LAJ

Interesting... I "met" her thru Darklady... I'll have to see what she knows.

From what I can see they got punked for over marketing to the SERPS [google]. I bet you see a lot more of this in the coming months.