Also, you can leverage authority to some degree. If we can objectively say that Fleshbot, Tiny Nibbles, and other sites are okay - then we can reasonably suppose that any sites they link to won’t be spam (and probably, any sites that linked to from those sites).

Human beings are very good at discerning spam from not spam: I’d wager that if you mapped it, you’d find a lot of legit sites linking to other legit sites, and a lot of spam sites linking to spam sites, and not too much reciprocal linking between those two groups. (I imagine the spam sites would try to link to the real ones, but the real ones wouldn’t link back).

Google should have other data as well it can use; the number of subscriptions in Google Reader, the nascent bookmarking service, etc. I’d think that this kind of data is the next logical step in search anyway.

Susie Bright’s site.
Jane’s Guide.
McStories.
For sheer entertainment value, I’d go with Ali Davis’ True Porn Clerk Stories.

On the commerce side, if we didn’t return Good Vibes or Adam & Eve or Xandria when people requested them, I’d be a little worried.

But as I mentioned, I haven’t kept up with the porn area since I worked on SafeSearch. I’m curious to read the must-see list from more experts.

I went to their site and started catagorizing Comstock Films, but as I recall two questions brought me up short. One was about “artistic merit” and the other was about “educational value”.

Our films have been called both, repeatedly and from a variety of sources. But I was afraid if I said our site was both artistic and education that I would ultimately be labeled fraudulalent by IRCA and incur some penalty.

What I ended up doing was nothing, counting on the fact that our site plainly is what it is, that the generous use of colloquial sex language would be more than enough to tip off any “safe surfing” filter that our site is not for children.

Add into that mix the fact more than a few educators have said that our films would, with proper guidence, be appropriate and useful in teaching youth about the role of emotions in sexual relationships.

It all gets very confusing.

Has the site labeled itself through ICRA or some other industry-standard metadata/server-side content labeling system? I’ve been involved in the retail products end of the adult internet since early 1998. As a general rule the more responsible businesses do everything they can to keep minors away from their sites. Properly labeling a site so that content filters can do their jobs is the responsible thing to do.

If Googlebot is indexing a site with a high percentage of phrases like “cum gargling crumbastaphiles”, “double anal whores”, “A cum sucking whore named…”, “Join Now”, “Click to buy”, etc., and the site isn’t content-labeled then that is something that I think could (should?) be taken into consideration for search ranking.

These kinds of suggestions eventually lead into “slippery-slope” discussions of mandatory labels and government regulations, etc.

I also think little things like claiming a site in Google’s Webmaster tools should account for some small level of credibility (or lack thereof) for an adult site. I assume the spam sites won’t claim their sites for various reasons. Maybe this is an incorrect assumption but I don’t think so. Spammers want to stay under the radar not proclaim the spam as their own.

We try to run a quality site at ADT. In the roughly 7 years we’ve been online we’ve turned away hundreds of potential advertisers that didn’t meet our quality guidelines. That’s not something that you can program into a search engine algorithm but we do have a unique perspective on which adult DVD retail websites operate in an honest and ethical fashion based on our own business dealings with them and feedback from the shoppers that use our services.

Here’s three recommendations for quality businesses in the adult DVD retail sector: adultdvdempire.com, xrentdvd.com and bushdvd.com. These three companies are class acts and constantly improve their sites to the benefit of their customers.

Allowing users to tag sites with keywords (like the many blog search engines) would also diminish the power of seo companies spam tactics.

One of my favorite porn producers, Tony Comstock, has some interesting ideas about the intersection of Google and sex:The sex industry is, if not actually dominated by, at least characterized by businesses which make their margin by *not* giving people…