December has been a bad month in Google for adult webmasters. John Mueller dropped a bombshell on blackhatters and adult webmasters (often 1 in the same) by letting everyone know that just because your website features adult content doesn mean it is excluded from Google Search guidelines:
“I understand that some people might say ‘oh, well, everyone in my niche is doing it the wrong way therefore I also need to do it that way.’ And I don’t know. It might be that there are individuals in special niches where our systems just aren’t picking up the abusive or problematic techniques well enough.”
The adult industry tends to be the most innovative when it comes to marketing and the use of technology. With technology comes many, many products and with marketing comes a seemingly unlimited amount of variety in aestetics. This leads to major volume in adult niches which lead to tremendous amounts of websites being created that Google needs to regulate and keep from exploiting the flaws in their search engine’s ranking system.
To throw gas on the fire, Mueller also announced that rich snippets are longer allowed on adult websites:
“It’s more that our systems recognize: oh this is an adult website, and it wants to show these rich results types, but since it’s an adult website we just won’t show them. So it’s not like it will be demoted or anything.”
Not all search engines allow adult content and in a industry that may be pioneers in innovation also greatly suffer when there is a lack of it. Long term content value is hard when content volume is created at such a rate that it is in the adult entertainment. Because of all this adult webmasters need as much help as maximizing their search potential making it a difficult niche to perform well in.
Will Google continue to crackdown on Adult websites? Most likely as it is a niche that is usually a “test bed” for blackhat methodology and pushing the limits to see what is possble to do in Google Search.