Google is giving me nightmares.
No, really. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night for the last week or so, panicking about duplicate content, robots.txt files and how my blog software may have ruined all my rankings.
The reason I’ve become obsessed is that Google has decided Ms Naughty is spam, and booted me to the very end of the search results. Of course, you’re not actually supposed to confess such things in public in case people decide that Google is right and you’re wrong, but I’m sure those that know me and this site realise that this is just a case of mistaken identity. I work hard to make my site relevant and useful.
And I’m really hoping that Google will work this out soon.
I had never really looked into the murky, haphazard world of search engine optimisation before. I’d always just built sites according to the golden rule, which is to cater to your users and make a worthy site that people will like – and link to.
Advertisement
Support independent, ethically made, award-winning porn. Bright Desire features all of my erotic films and writing. A membership to Bright Desire gets you access to every movie I've ever made and lets me keep making female friendly porn!
Click here to find out more.
-------------------------------------------------------
Up until January, that worked well. But then something changed in Google’s algorithm and suddenly I was persona non-grata. My blog posts are regularly relegated to the last pages of a search.
And it’s not just me this has happened to. A large number of previously authoritative sites are now fighting out it for last spot. Nobody knows why. It could be because blog software creates duplicate content all over the place, but that’s just a theory. It could even be because I took part in the Sugasm, which is meant to be a blog-sharing thing, but could now be seen as spamming. Who knows?
But here’s the thing. It now means that if you want relevant results from Google, you should set your results limit to 100 and then check the very last page. Because that’s where you’ll find some useful information.
Some examples.
A search for the term “real lesbian” will give a couple of relevant results on the first page. Then, right at the very end, you’ll find a link to Pink and White productions – makers of VERY authentic lesbian erotica.
Type in the term “sex blogs” and there at the end you’ll find Viviane’s Sex Carnival – one of the more popular sex blog sites – and an article on sex blogging from none other than Clean Sheets Ezine.
Is this just an extention of the Google “disappears” sex blogs story from late December? Possibly. My problem is that this post is unlikely to appear in Boing Boing or the mainstream media and thus get the attention of Matt Cutts who will step in to personally fix the blogs in question.
And maybe that will be because this post will be on the fucking last page and no-one will ever read it.
Yes, I’m a little tense today.
I’m not going to claim that my site doesn’t have a commercial motive, because it does. At the same time, this blog is not just a spam blog. I spend a lot of time researching on-topic posts and I know that what I write is useful to surfers.
I’ve spent a shitload of time in the last week trying to clean up the site and make it more Google-friendly. I worry that I’m actually making it less user-friendly (have you noticed the tags are gone?), but that’s the way things are starting to go. Trying to please Google turns you into a mad, harried thing, scurrying to satisfy the whims of a giant without actually knowing what those whims really are.
So… I guess this post is really just a sad rant, an attempt to get my frustration out into cyberspace so I can at least have a good nights sleep without dreaming about Google.
If nothing else, I can take comfort in Yahoo. They still offer the kind of relevant results Google used to give a couple of years ago.
Previous posts on this topic:
Well, Google screwed me too
Ms Naughty is about porn for women