Google Is Tweaking Sex Searches Again
Since the great Google scare of 2006 I’ve noticed some very good things happening in our search-driven traffic. Specifically traffic generated by the searches ‘tera patrick’ and ‘nina hartley’, and others of dubious Relevance has been slowly drying up as our PageRank on those terms has been steadily falling.
I know people who come to Comstock Films on those search terms aren’t finding what their looking for because Google Analytics shows their page count average is extremely low. So that’s good for them.
It’s good for us too. If someone’s looking for a picture of Tera Patrick or for a review of Nina Hartley’s new book, more than likely they’re just going to be pissed off if they get end up on our site. Angry people don’t buy our DVDs, at least not if they’re angry at us!
Unfortunately, this tweeking has also moved our ranking in more Relevant search terms way way down. Of course I think we should be at the very very top of the search ‘real sex’, but my own biases aside, this morning the returns for the ‘real sex’ search look goofy. Should Comstock Films be utterly and completely outranked by a book about chastity, or a YouTube clip of turtles fucking, or article about cybersex? I hope not! Overnight we’ve dropped precipitously in other searches that traditionally work well for us too.
If it sounds like I’m sending up a flair, well hell yes I am! Propane is nearly $3/gallon, and this cold snap has us burning it at a prodigeous rate. Hey Google! Got an ETA on when this latest tweek will sort itself out? It’s not supposed to get above freezing for another week!
Update
Since the above post, I took a look at the Google index for ComstockFilms.com, http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.comstockfilms.com&hl=en, and noticed some odd things.
For starters, neither index.html or main.html are anywhere near the top, not first page, not fifth page. In fact, Peggy’s blog is number one, which is nice for her, except she’s not the most active blogger in the world. It’s certainly not our most important page. (At least now I have an explanation for why last week we suddenly started getting all those visits on the search ‘ovusoft blog’.)
No less odd is seeing casting.html at #6, a page that hasn’t been active in two years. No reason that should be ranked so high. None of the archive pages from the old blog should be there either. On the fear those old pages may have been giving us a duplicate content ding, we excluded them from being indexed in our robot.txt six weeks ago, and the bot’s been by for a visit three times since then.
It looks to me like a hiccup in the Googleverse, which is actually a relief. Better a bug that gets fixed, than a re-ranking that could turn our world upside-down. But I’m reminded of the old phrase, “when America gets a cold, the world gets pneumonia”. When Google has a “bad hair day”, little guys like Comstock Films end up with a bad hair cut!
