Safesearch filters all of my images - but they're clean

[Asia_Expat]

My website has no nudity or smut. There is an Asian models section on the site where members can post images of their favourite Asian celebs and some of those are quite sexy... but ALL of them are clothed and the gallery is carefully moderated.

However, all of my sites images are filtered by safesearch, even views of Hong Kong Harbour and various city view. To me, this seems absurd. How can I rectify this?

I do not participate in the 'enhanced image' program in Webmastertools.

[vincevincevince]

Perhaps those which are borderline should go onto another domain? One problem can be hotlinking - stop that 100%. If people hotlink to your images using 'sexy' keywords then you're toast.

[Asia_Expat]

If I prevent hotlinking, how long can I expect to wait for a correction... should I submit some kind of reinclusion request?... How do I contact google over this matter?

[Asia_Expat]

I have another question (hopefully someone like jdMorgan will read this)... The following is the htaccess file created by my gallery software and placed in the gallery directory...

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://www.myownwebsite.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://www.google.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://images.google.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://www.yahoo.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://images.search.yahoo.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://www.live.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://search.live.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://www.msn.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://search.msn.com//.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif¦jpg¦jpeg¦png¦GIF¦JPG¦JPEG¦PNG)$ - [F]

... my questions... If I move this file up to the root of the domain, will that provide protection for the whole website? Is there anything I should be aware of if I do that?... and have I successfully blocked everyone except the big three search engines? Is it really necessary to add my own domain to that list, as I have?

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 1:53 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2008]

[Asia_Expat]

I'm actually considering dumping all the images from this category and 404ing them. It's a drastic step but I'm really annoyed about the safesearch filtering everything... I don't even have any smut in the first place!

Doea anyone else have any suggestions to fix this issue? I'm clueless to be honest.

[edited by: tedster at 7:29 pm (utc) on Jan. 24, 2008]

[piatkow]

It could easily be something on the site being misinterpreted. I had a photo gallery treated as "adult" because it related to a place name that contained the letters s,e and x in that sequence.

Don't even mention a certain town in north Lincolnshire.

[tedster]

If the site publishes user-provided images, there may accidental occurences of incorrect (and adult) meta data embedded in some or many of the files. Depending on how the user works with their software, incorrect metadata can happen. Enough accidents like this and the entire domain's images might be filtered.

Also, Google recently entered a patent application that offers a lot of clues on how images can be automatically processed for search. Here's the patent application [appft1.uspto.gov]. Notice these possibilities, especially when there is little or no data/metadata directly associated with an image:

1. Images can be auto-tagged according to shapes, colors, and textures. This may involve breaking down images into smaller tiles and tagging those tiles.

2. Images can be compared to other indexed images from around the web that have similar extracted features. Then keywords that are semantically related to those other images may be imported and used to tag the image that is being classified.

I can see lots of ways that an image might be incorrectly filtered. When it comes to image search, any search engine might prefer to err on the conservative side.

[edited by: tedster at 9:11 pm (utc) on June 3, 2008]

[Asia_Expat]

I decided to delete them all (celebs)and they're now producing 404's/410's... They were only attracting teenage image grabbers anyway... waste of bandwidth.

We'll see what happens.

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 12:05 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2008]

[whats up skip]

I am starting to think that Google assumes the word "sexy" equates to <adult content>. Do you think I should be removing the reference to "sexy" in the dating section of my web site.

Moderator's note: Small edit made, because we don't want safe search or libary filters to react to WebmasterWorld either.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:14 am (utc) on April 5, 2008]

[whats up skip]

I have been doing some more research and I have found several pictures (in the default safesearch mode) from pages containing reference to "sexy". This may or may not mean it is the issue. It could be ok, or it could be that these sites have not yet been deemed to adult.

[Asia_Expat]

It's been two months now since I removed all the images. They've all been dropped but my site is still stuck in the safe search filter, fo no reason at all IMO.
Incidentally, I tried signing up for the enhanced thingy in webmastertools and it's had no effect so far.

[bumpski]

This may seem hard to believe, but I've found the sites you link to can prevent your images being indexed for the safe search filter.

I spent several months removing links to sites with any remotely unsafe keywords and found after 3 more months that my images were now being indexed by safe search.

Also make sure you don't link to a site whose images do not show up in safe search, even if there is no apparent reason.

One site I linked to involved electronics, but it did mention the sex (male and female) of connectors. Another site had surgical images and wording. After removing links to these sites my images were indexed for safe search.

I call it guilt by association. Be careful what you link to!