Google promoting us for undeserved adult term

[MikeNoLastName]

This is almost laughable (at least as an example of how gullible G is), except that suddenly G has decided to give our (totally unrelated) site HUGE page 1 exposure in searches (according to WMT) for a certain obviously #*$!ographic phrase.
It is actually related to the perfectly legitimate name of a popular creative work title which we barely mention on TWO large-sized pages out of thousands, and have a corresponding photo on one, of no interest to the people looking for the other topic. BUT if segmented (focusing on 2 out of the 3 sequential words) and taken out of context makes a totally different meaning which has become particularly popular in the last couple weeks. Think along the lines of the children's school reader book quote "See Dick play with the ball" (hope that doesn't get me censored here as well :).
I've already changed all mentions on the site to use search engine unrecognizable phonetic equivalents for the benefit of our readers (so as to not deprive them of the true meaning of the text - so much for "writing for the readers" vs. the relatively stupid search engines), changed and renamed the related image to a placeholder to not entice image searchers, and Gbot fetched and resubmitted the offending page, but G still continues to make it our highest placed search query for the entire site a week after the changes, probably making us look like a #*$! site, which we are not.
I know it is a bit backwords, but any other suggestions of tactics to EVADE a search term?

[tedster]

Sounds like you're taking many of the obvious steps.

HUGE page 1 exposure in searches (according to WMT)

Does that mean you can't duplicate those results when you do the search?

[Hoople]

Perhaps taking a chapter out of the 'clueless about SEO' folks playbook: make a graphic placeholder of the offending keyword.

Serve it inline with the picture's file named as an unrelated file name. You might have to do this with several word in proximity to break the search's grip.

I had to do this once in a discussion group's portal main page to keep the host from putting it in the adult category.

[lucy24]

Hee, hee.

Been there. Done that. On a much smaller scale, duh.

For a while there I was thinking seriously of running a global replace in one e-book so its title would come out as "Grandmother Pu<span class = "invisible">Cat</span>ss" and similarly for the rest of the book. (Yes, it's a children's book about a cat and a mouse.) Fortunately the dirty old men seem to have gone away on their own. Some day I may be able to stop redirecting requests from Pakistan for another page whose text is similarly misinterpreted. Also misspelled.

Would be nice, wouldn't it, if people at least glanced at the search engine's sample text snippet and deduced that your page isn't really what they're looking for.

[Hoople]

On a much smaller scale, duh.

Simpler and just as effective! That's what I love about this place - always learning new techniques!

[lucy24]

Oops, I need to step back in here. The people looking for geriatric dirty pictures didn't simply disappear, I drove them away. Forgot that part. Last night I edited the page for an unrelated reason and found:

<meta name = "description" content = "Short picture book from around 1880. If you expected something very different, you are in the wrong place.">

This has caused the page to disappear entirely from g### SERPs even if you search for the book by title. (Instead you get the Project Gutenberg version-- which is the same book* plus PG boilerplate-- and a bunch of PG scrapers.) It still gets a fair number of hits from image searches-- the right kind, ahem. If I force the result by constraining it to my site, I find that they are using the meta description as the search snippet. "Move along. These aren't the pages you're looking for."

This, incidentally, answers the occasional question about whether a meta description is good for anything. It's good for chasing away customers :) It also leads to the weird and unfamiliar result of seeing something with my name on it ranking higher in bing (which doesn't use the meta description) than in google.


* This is completely legitimate. They have a slightly odd approach to their trademark.

[MikeNoLastName]

Let's see,
Tedster, my results were different until I went into the images section and there we were there in about 6th place. According to WMT we were getting like 20K impressions, but only about 50 hits... for the photo I assume, so it wasn't like we were missing anything. Just a bunch of blind pervs.
Hoople. duh, I forgot about that one. We've used it elsewhere where the same out of context word is used repeatedly as a link. Will adopt that. Thanks.
Lucy, Used that once looong time ago. Didn't I read somewhere that the SEs were negative on doing that method? I think my pervs beat your pervs. I think mine were related to a certain American college football ex-coach. :)