Do you think profanity in the content can harm a site's rankings?
-
In my early 20's I authored an ebook that provides men with natural ways to improve their ahem... "bedroom performance".
I'm now in my mid 30s, and while it's not such an enthralling topic, the thing makes me 80 or so bucks a day on good days, and it actually works. I update the blog from time to time and build links to it on occasion from good sources.
I've carried my SEO knowledge to a more "reputable" business, but this project is still interesting to me, because it's fully mine. I am more interested in getting it to rank and convert than anything, but following the same techniques that are working to grow the other business, this one continues to tank.
Disavow bad links, prune thin content.. no difference. However, one thing I just noticed now are my search queries in the reports. When I first started blogging on this, I was real loose with my tongue, and spoke quite frankly (and dirty to various degrees). I'm much more refined and professional in how I write now. However, the queries I'm ranking for... a lot of d words, c words (in the sex sense)... sounds almost pornographic.
Think Google may be seeing this, and putting me lower in rankings or in some sort of lower level category because of it? Heard anything about google penalizing for profanity?
I guess in this time of authority and trust, that can hurt both of those... but I wonder if anyone's heard any actual confirmation of this or has any experience with this?
Thanks!
-
That’s something I’ve seen. Credentialed folks taking up much more space in the first pages of the SERPS. I don’t have credentials, and will not be spending the time / money in that direction, but I see the advice in many of these higher ranking results, and it’s often used and abused / recycled info that doesn’t do the job, or outright incorrect (I know my stuff, not a hack job ;).
But yes, you bring up another concern of mine... Is what I AM unfixable.
Thing that gives me some light / hope are some of sites taking up high rankings are not credentialed at all either. One is a kid in his mid / late 20s who writes about SEO / Marketing and... random sex articles? I believe he’s a social / outreach / networking phenom though, has links from super high DA sources.
Get Roman and For Hims are obviously purely commercial, but have money for high ranking placement and to get MDs to write articles.
There are also several “pick up artist” and “alpha method” ”bro type sites” with no credentials, (and some with very little links built to them), ranking for mediocre content...
All this gives me hope to stay in there, but I’ve definitely seen the trend you’re mentioning here...
-
We don't compete in your space, but we do have a site that competes by keyword overlap with sites that advise on alternative medicine. The overlap consists of at least 100 keywords, many of which have a monthly volume of 10,000+
The comparisons of our site vs alt med sites are as follows...
university degrees and government-issued licenses vs. author panache and social cred
scientific terminology vs. common language (which has a higher search volume)
factual information vs. lore and creative writing
Over the past two years, on three occasions, we have received substantial improvements in rankings and traffic as the alt med sites have dropped. I attribute it to Google wanting the SERPs to be populated more with formal credentials and technical prose rather than with lore and panache. We intentionally improved how our E-A-T is displayed about two years ago and I think that has been helpful.
In these situations, a person can only guess at what might be doing this, however, other sites similar to ours have seen the same improvements at the same times.
-
Excellent insights... thank you for taking the time to look into this.
I like the analysis of the three groups... one concern I have is... what if I'm only ranking BECAUSE I'm using these dirty words... the higher authority sites such as WebMD etc. are controlling and taking over searches for the more technical verbiage. Also, big money brands such as Forhims etc. who can probably pay for massive link building campaigns and promotion.
What I would hope with this is that Google... especially with the new update that's supposed to concentrate on language, will see the similarities in the terms, and keep me there... however, I've seen that google can still be pretty straightforward when it comes to ranking for terms. You want to rank, you write it verbatim...
As to traffic, I was on a pretty good uptick of visits until October of last year, when there was a massive drop with the medic update... I'd say about 60 - 70% of my traffic. E-A-T was spoken about quite a bit.
The changes have been drops with each big update since then. Last time there was growth was after the long lull after penguin came into play, and I disavowed a ton of reciprocal links and shady links, and had a massive jump, a couple of years after that, when another major update came around (don't want to look at the analytics, but some time around 2015 -2016 I'd say)... since then though, mostly drops with a lot of the major updates.
But I get that feeling... they don't approve of something... trying to pinpoint what that is, and just began hypothesizing this may be it after seeing search terms I'm ranking for..
-
Imagine the population of people who are interested in the bedroom topics that you have written about... I think that they would fall into three groups...
-
people that enjoy the "dirty talk"
-
people who don't care about it - they just want to read the content
-
people who are put off by the "dirty talk" and don't share the content or even read it very far
I think that group 1 would continue reading if the language was cleaned up, but if the language was cleaned up group 3 might appreciate the content and read it and value it. Google might have a similar view and discriminate against "dirty talk", unless the searcher has safe search turned off. So cleaning the content up might improve rankings.
You said... "this one continues to tank". What exactly does that mean? A slow and steady ranking and traffic decline? A slow and steady loss of traffic through external links? Or have there been a small number of sudden drops in visitors, in rankings, in revenue?
If your answer is "slow and steady" then I would bet that much of the loss is coming from the increased competitiveness of the internet and the emergence of new competitors. Anyone who owns a 15 year old site that has not been getting a lot of regular new content and existing content improvement is seeing this.
If the losses are small and sudden, then it could be algo changes at Google that is knocking the site because they don't approve of something. Just speculations.
-
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
About porn sites and ranking
Hello, I'm thinking to extend my website into porn. At the moment there is no pornography on it, although we do talk about sex related topics and products (from dating to tutorials, to toys etc.) Would it be dangerous to keep the porn section on the same domain as the rest? Would this negatively affect my non-porn content as Googlebot would "flag" my website as being pornographic (although only a few pages would be)? Or simply Googlebot would leave the current non-porn pages ranking as they are now, just fine, and plus it would rank the porn pages if they "deserve" to? I hope my question is clear. I don't want to create a subdomain.
Algorithm Updates | | fabx0 -
Google not crawling click to expand content - suggestions?
It seems like Google confirmed this week in a G+ hangout that content in click to expand content e.g. 'read more' dropdown and tabbed content scenarios will be discounted. The suggestion was if you have content it needs to be visible on page load. Here's more on it https://www.seroundtable.com/google-index-click-to-expand-19449.html and the actual hangout, circa 11 mins in https://plus.google.com/events/cjcubhctfdmckph433d00cro9as. From a UX and usability point of view having a lot of content that was otherwise tabbed or in click to expand divs can be terrible, especially on mobile. Does anyone have workable solutions or can think of examples of really great landing pages (i'm mostly thinking ecommerce) that also has a lot of visible content? Thanks Andy
Algorithm Updates | | AndyMacLean0 -
What would you recommend i do to improve my rankings?
I am looking for some advice as to what I need to do to improve my rankings? website: www.funktiongolf.co.uk Thanks Ben
Algorithm Updates | | funktiongolf0 -
Ranking Drop After Switching Sites
I have a client who's rankings dropped after switching to out site. We know that rankings can drop a little after switching, but we are concerned that hers are still low. Any suggestions? As far as I can tell, the links to her site remained the same. Thanks Holly
Algorithm Updates | | hwade1 -
Content, for the sake of the search engines
So we all know the importance of quality content for SEO; providing content for the user as opposed to the search engines. It used to be that copyrighting for SEO was treading the line between readability and keyword density, which is obviously no longer the case. So, my question is this, for a website which doesn't require a great deal of content to be successful and to fullfil the needs of the user, should we still be creating relavent content for the sake of SEO? For example, should I be creating content which is crawlable but may not actually be needed / accessed by the user, to help improve rankings? Food for thought 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | underscorelive0 -
Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites
One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years. Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products. The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed. The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable. Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?
Algorithm Updates | | DavidWilsonSEO0 -
Host name per content
Hello everyone. I'm in charge of the website HispaZone.com in which apart from many other things we provide free program downloads in spanish in a similar way to softpedia, tucows, cnet, softonic and others. I'm not a great SEO but I try to do my best. Several months ago based on my most important competence (softonic.com and uptodown.com) I decided that I would give a host name under the domain hispazone.com for the landing page of each program download. For downloading Nero for example the landing page would be http://nero.hispazone.com and like this for the whole of our 800 program database. The thing is that after 5-6 months since that change and after many other improvements, the traffic coming from google to these downloads dropped dramatically. We thought it could have been related to Google Panda but we recently hired an SEO consultant and he says that it's because of not having the downloads under the same host name. That we lose the page authority and the link flow from the hostname http://www.hispazone.com. The SEO consultant seems to be great, very up to date with all new changes in google. We made many improvements thanks to him and I can say that I trust him with everything. But now comes the time for deciding if we move our program download landing pages back to the www.hispazone.com hostname. I would like some second opinion about this because the fact that the biggest ones in Spain like Softonic and Uptodown have a hostname for each program download when these companies invest really a lot in their SEO makes me be unsure of going back into having all under the same hostname. Thanks a lot.
Algorithm Updates | | HispaZone0 -
Bounce rate and rankings
I have believed for years that a high bounce rate (from search) could lower your rankings over time. Makes sense; if users bounce right back to search after looking at your page Google should think that page wasn't very useful and will push your down the SERPs. But, how do they determine this? If a user comes back after 30 seconds that's a bounce? Or is my premise incorrect and Google does not take bounce into account? Erin
Algorithm Updates | | ErinTM0