Google, Personal Information & Porn Sites

Webmaster Discussion
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#1

It seems a tactic black hat SEOs are using to bring down their competitors is putting personal information on their competitor’s site and then reporting it to Google…

http://searchenginewatch.com/3641581

What’s interesting is that if you look at what information Google will take action on…

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164133

While things like social security numbers, bank account or credit card numbers and images of a person’s signature are always a bad idea, for certain types of porn sites it gets tougher - they can’t have business names or people’s full names. It’s not just any porn site that gets the extra scutiny, but “low quality” porn sites. Low quality encompasses things like sites with duplicate content (e.g. sites that are fed by RSS feeds), sites where pages are loaded with irrelevant keywords, sites with hidden text, sneaky redirects, etc.

Now mind you, your low quality site probably isn’t doing very well in Google to start with, but if you have an otherwise high quality site with one section that’s low quality a competitor could post a comment with personal information and get Google to review your site and they could discover the low quality section of your site and suddenly the whole site gets deindexed because of the personal information.

Even those of you who think you’re running a clean ship - you could get penalized if you link to a site that gets banned/deindexed. I know a lot of you do link exchanges like crazy, but linking to low quality sites can hurt you

Curiously phone numbers and addresses don’t seem to be personal information that’s of concern to Google - probably because of sites like switchboard.com. But you still should be careful with personal information - especially if you do splogs.

#2

Re: Google, Personal Information & Porn Sites

That is very interesting, that shows how very important it is that you check everything you publish, including comments. I’ve never dared having anything setup on automatic, instead we always check everything manually before publishing it, be it a web site listing, comment or uploaded files.

#3

Re: Google, Personal Information & Porn Sites

That article is very misleading and the author is purposely using his language very carefully.

He doesn’t mention how easily and instantaneously Webmaster Tools will re-index the page after it’s been modified or removed. He also doesn’t tell you that webmaster tools notifies you of the page removal request automatically.

It’s important to remind people that Google states only 4 types of very specific scenarios will result in a page being removed:

  • Your social security or government ID number
  • Your bank account or credit card number
  • An image of your handwritten signature
  • Your first and last name or the name of your business appearing on an adult content site that's spamming Google's search results.

Unfortunate that Search Engine Guide has hired him on to scare people into readership. Man it sucks having to educate people, and fill in the gaps, when slanted articles like this are published :bad: