Problem ranking with a generic site that used to be an adult site.

[errorsamac]

About six months ago I purchased a generic domain name that you would assume is a widget site (just by the domain name). The previous owner was trying to take advantage of this generic widget domain name and he put affiliate adult content all over it. He also linked to the site from his other 200 adult websites. In the end, he never ranked on any of the major search engines and he eventually sold the domain to me.

Now I have example.com and it's an on-topic widget website. However, when you search for "widgets", the site is clearly penalized (result # 950+), even though the content of the website is all about widgets. Searches for "example com" (not example.com) or searches for unique strings of text from the website also do not return the site. I do not believe that I over optimized and I am getting some links to the site, but it takes time to build a number of quality links. Looking at the links via Yahoo Site Explorer, there are about 200 adult links to it and 20 widget links.

Is there an adult penalty that Google uses to automatically remove adult sites from the SERPs so people searching for "widgets' don't accidentally come across them? Or is this a case where I just need to build more on-topic trust to my website?

[piatkow]

I didn't think they specifically removed any legal adult content but don't forget that it is filtered by default. Check your position with safe search both on and off. I had a photo gallery mistakenly flagged as adult once and I only noticed that when I retried a query with safe search off. I don't know what the procedure is now but then it was just a matter of a single email to get it sorted.

Of course there may just be 950 widget sites that G thinks are a better match on your sample search.