Google is attempting to fix the Comstock - Babeland - Violet Blue - Chelsea Girl lockout
Tony Comstock of Comstock Films has been in conversation with a Google insider over the recent sex-related search hassles.
I hadn't realized it until a couple of days ago, but Comstock Films had a celebrity visitor comment on my Will Google Kill Comstock Films post of a few days ago.
Matt Cutts is the head of Google's webspam team, and if you spend any time surfing around the SEO-osphere, you'll see his name come up rather frequently. Since that comment, Matt and I have had a bit of correspondence about sex on the internet...
Details, including historical technical details from Matt, here.
It sounds as though the big issue has been distinguishing legitimate sex sites from the, um, explosion of nuisance/spam sex websites. (A semi-inevitable problem with Google-like algorithm-driven ranking systems.)
The good news? Google actually does a great deal of human-driven tweaking and they've expressed willingness to work with Tony and others to normalize things. In particular they've invited Tony to suggest some good reference sites for Google to work from. I think that's great.
Even better, Tony's extended an invitation to others to contribute to his list in comments. If you've got strong opinions head over and let him, and by extension Google, know.
In *my* opinion one good place they could start is my recommended websites, which appears just below my blogroll. But that's just my opinion. :-) (Reminder to self: make sure there's been no link drift in the reference list since the last time I checked.)
Update: By the way, I can totally, totally appreciate Google's position (if not their execution) in the fight against spam websites. This blog is now getting up to 3,000 spam comments *a day!* Every single one is designed with one thing in mind: generating bogus links in order to boost the Google page rank for this or that scam site. 3,000 a day! And in the grand scheme of things this isn't even a large blog. Thanks to MovableType's remarkably good moderation/spam filtering I rarely have to manually a handful or so a day. Multiply that by millions of blogs and you start to appreciate the scope of Google's dilemma.
It's worth repeating, though, that Google isn't a mindless automatic enterprise -- they do a lot of hand-tweaking. Plus the people working there are pretty sharp tacks. Which is why giving them a good baseline to work with -- via comments to Tony's post, for instance, will probably do a lot of good.
