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When picking a domain name for your business, do you stay away from domain names that might be read in an adult way?
For example, a popular site ExpertsExchange.com may be perceived to be read in a different way, such as ExpertSexChange.com.
One webmaster asked a domain he likes named ProductsExperts.com might be read as ProductSexPerts.com. Would that have a negative impact on the domains ranking? I.e. will Google filter it out because it may be perceived as an adult domain?
The answer is no.
Google's Matt Cutts said in response to that in a Google Webmaster Help thread:
In general we do a pretty good job with this. I wouldn't worry about it. We don't think that ExpertsExchange is ExpertSexChange for example.
I assume Google uses more than just the domain name to figure out if the site is adult related or not.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for buy with blowup doll
Comments:
Brandon
12/26/2012 04:23 pm
What are "Sex Perts"? lol I guess the real concern is whether having "sex" in the domain name could hurt rankings.
Tien V Nguyen
12/26/2012 06:18 pm
Empirical evidence suggests otherwise...If I google "Expert sex change" then the second result is this twitter https://twitter.com/ExpertsExchange
serlak2012
12/26/2012 06:44 pm
Nice to see my question to show up http://www.seroundtable.com :). My real concern was word "sex" somehow affecting future rankings. And BTW there is a word "pert" http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pert
sestuff
12/27/2012 01:36 am
I think that's just due to the amount of authority that Twitter has in Google search results. In reality, I don't think Google's algo actually understands the meaning of search results - IMO they simply use relevance and authority. For this reason, when you are as popular as Twitter, you get to rank for broad terms regardless of how the words are presented because the authority starts to slightly outweigh relevancy.
Jaimie Sirovich
12/28/2012 11:24 pm
Who cares if Google gets it, what about _people_ and internet filtering at your office that is much more naive than Google? It's a risk. Electronic Sexpo is my favorite one of these — www.electronics-expo.com (they added the dash). Conclusion: Even if Google gets it right, English is not your first language if you pick a domain that matches the regular expression /sex/.
Jerrod Thomas
12/30/2012 09:32 pm
Where did you find that extremely creepy picture. nevermind.