From Mark’s column:
One problem in the sex blog snafu is the nature of the blogs’ subject matter and the exploitation of sex searches online. Blogs like Tiny Nibbles and Dirty Pretty Things and ErosBlog try to give insight into human sexuality in a more artful way than the average glossy porn magazine. But so many unsavory characters are trawling the web trying to divert the huge amount of sex searches to their own businesses — even if the business has nothing to do with sex.
Well that’s the cheapest of all the trick and tips that are followed on the internet.If your business is not related to that particular thing then why do you want to target a traffic which is useless for you.
Sex blogs are not the only websites hit by Google’s algorithm tweaking (or whatever else they were doing). DXing.info, a very popular website among radio hobbyists, and a good, information-rich site, that doesn’t do anything even remotely associated with spamming, or with excessive optimization, has been for years in the top three search results on Google when searching “DXing”. It had a PageRank of 6, which was the highest in the world for DXing sites. Now, suddenly, it has vanished (in November) from the Google database and doesn’t show up in the search results anymore. I’m not talking about being demoted to a lower rank, like it happened for the sex blogs (or to many sites during the “Florida Update” in 2003): DXing.info has just disappeared from Google. Gone. Searching for “dxing.info” brings up many pages that link to it, but not the site itself. Which has caused it to lose over one-third of its audience in a few weeks. The editor tried to contact Google, but got no answer. I wrote a post telling the whole story here:
http://www.lunchoverip.com/2007/01/google_killed_t.html