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Can Links From Porn Sites Hurt Your Search Rankings?

When you're a webmaster, it's important to check your analytics to ensure that everything there is looking good. You can get a good sense of where your traffic is coming from, be it search traffic or uh, porn site traffic, and you can overall get ideas of where you may be able to improve your website for more visitor consumption.

So when one of our forum regulars checked his statistics, he was a little shocked to see that he's getting more than 3000 visits from a porn site. Is this damaging to his site? Can he get penalized?

Well, the one thing is that he's mentioning that he had 3000 visits, not links. Regardless, if they were links, the only "risk" involved here is that there's a possibility that Google will consider that your site has adult content (even if it doesn't). Of course, if only a small percentage of your inbound links are coming from porn sites, you have a lot less to worry about, but the key here is percentage. There's no exact percentage, here, though. Just keep in mind that if the majority of your links are coming from adult-themed sites, you might trigger an "adult" filter even if your content isn't adult.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.



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posted Tamar Weinberg in Google Optimization at May 14, 2008 9:14 AM Comments (2)

Comments

so do you report the offending porn sites to Google as spammers?

 

I agree on percentage, but I also strongly believe that inbound one-way links are only important as a segment of the overall SEO strategy.The Google algo has a complex formula to take into context the whole thing:inbound links,on page content,on page links,reciprocal links etc. etc.
In an extreme case as you have said one could be hurt by bad neighbourhood. But thats why webmasters are paid to keep things in close scrutiny.

 

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