Lost rankings because of the word "kinky"?

[johoney]

is it probable that the use of the word "kinky" in my site is responsible for plummeting traffic and ranking?

[tedster]

The word itself would either cause the SafeSearch filter to kick in or not - on or off, all or nothing. So rankings going lower (but not disappearing) would not associated with any given word.

[johoney]

thank you tedster.

[steveb]

Not true. Words like that can kill ranking for pages, regardless of the safe filter.

Just happened to me last month with teh word playboy.

[ecmedia]

I totally disagree. A specific word(s) has no relationship with ranking.

[bwnbwn]

ecmedia
Do a test add playboy to a page that is indexed and coming up in the rankings and lets see.

[tedster]

Interesting report, steveb. Experience matters, and I value your experience. I'd like to fine-tune our discussion a bit - I'll call this kind of word an "edge word" since it's on the edge of being adult, but it's not exclusively adult in its usage.

Are we talking about adding an edge word to an already existing page and then seeing the rankings drop - or having that edge word in place from the beginning of a page's life and only recently seeing rankings drop?

In other words, is a new ranking factor showing up here for semantically ambiguous words? It sounds like johoney is describing a page that only recently slid in the rankings but always include the suspicious edge word.

[travelin cat]

On one of our sites we have a page that is optimized for gay, lesbian, trans gender and bi sexual users. There are no "adult" info or references anywhere but the page is peppered with information that targets this specific type of user.

The page ranks very well for all of the keywords we care about and has been live for over a year.

I would think that if a ban such as the one this thread references exists, my page would be toast.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:15 am (utc) on April 24, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[potentialgeek]

Poison words may or may not exist. They could be connected in the algo to other filters. If your site has other issues of trust, for example, and some questionable words, the cumulative effect could cause ranking problems.

By now Google must have some clear way of distinguishing what is clean from what isn't.

Matt Cutts [en.wikipedia.org] takes the issue of porn (and presumably related issues) seriously.

"Before working at the quality group at Google, Cutts worked at the ads engineering group, and the SafeSearch capabilities. There he earned the nickname "porn cookie guy" by giving his wife's homemade cookies to any Googler who provided an example of unwanted porn in the search results."

p/g

[tedster]

It's also a serious search quality issue if writing about a type of hair (or a pig's tail, a musician/novelist, a type of gene, etc.) can cause a ranking drop for other terms on the site.

[steveb]

I added the word to a photo page. It ranked #1 for [word word playboy] for 24 hours, then went to 700 for that term and everything else. I changed the page so [word word the playboy] was the structure, no help. I removed playboy, 36 hours later the page regained rankings for the other stuff it used to rank for.

I added playboy to another page on the same topic, and the second page did not get penalized.

It's not poison words alone. I could add Playboy to other pages and see no effect. It's more complicated than that, but when talking about a single page, it's clear to me a single word can possibly kill it (and removal bring it back to life).

[tedster]

Do you have any suspicion about why the second page was not affected?

[steveb]

Possibly because it was a text/article page rather than a photo page. Possibly because the [word word playboy] triplet was not in the title. Possible because the penalized page was on the cusp of supplemnental but the other was not (say the difference between 5 links to the penalized one and 10 links to the one that was not). Possibly because the non-penalized page was not just text, but 1000 words of text completely unrelated to adult stuff.... on the penalized page "playboy" was 1/20th of the unique text on the page inclucing title (one out of twenty words, not including navigation). On the non-penalized page "playboy" is was 1/1000th of the text.