Half’s SEO Notebook

Just an early morning post about a Boing Boing post titled Google “disappears” sex blogs? Something’s broken. For the main dish, you can go read their post, but I did find an interesting trail left by Matt Cutts on Comstock Films comment section, dated Dec. 27, 2006:

Hey, I’m an engineer at Google. I just wanted to say that different people at Google saw this and were asking about it, so we’ll check out these reports from the sites such as tiny nibbles and others.

On the 23rd, Matt said in a blog post:

I know for a fact that there haven’t been any major algorithm updates to our scoring in the last few days

I doubt Google did anything major between Dec 23 and Dec 27th, and I must say the hype I’ve read so far is a little over the top, but I’m not in the habit of jumping to conclusions either way.

Since no one is actively competing against these sex blogs for terms like “Violet Blue”, “Tiny Nibbles” or “Comstock Films”, a drop in ranking is a big signal - but of what? Algorithm shift? I doubt it. A bug at the Plex? More likely. Also, its interesting to note that these blogs are already back on #1 for their site names, which was their biggest complaint.

I don’t buy the Adsense / organic search conspiracy theory and I also don’t buy the SEO Blackhat theory about Google actively suppressing adult sites from page one, though I do see it happening if people who ran Google Ads ever took over Google’s Search Quality team.

BTW, did you notice SEO Blackhat is on page one for “free porn” for a blog post that’s no more than one month old (published Nov 21, 2006)? 350+ clean IBLs and bam, you leave hundreds of thousands of cheap, bad-neighborhood link trades in the dust.