Comments on: Welcome, Sickos

By: Scott Eric Kaufman

Scott Eric Kaufman — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 18:13:04 +0000

I agree that cluttering the signal-to-noise ratio's a satisfying thought: "Sure, I'm completely and utterly powerless to actually do anything to stop the traffic in child pornography, but at the very least I can contribute to the general frustration of the people who view it." That said, when I look at my site referrals, I more often that not do a series of double-takes. My blog's called Acephalous, and I frequently find hits from searches like "sexy+women+acephalous" or "taliban+acephalous" or, well, you catch my drift. (Though it does hearten my that the majority of my Google referrals are for "nostalgie de la boue.")

By: Elf M. Sternberg

Elf M. Sternberg — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:19:43 +0000

There’s not much you can do about it. I’ll unabashedly confess to writing porn, have my own little erotica website, and some of the things I find in my search engine results scare me. What makes those people think they’ll find what they want?

The only thing those results point out to me is just how many of those kinds of people there are.

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:10:18 +0000

Since keeping fans of child pornography from your site won’t change their behavior and certainly doesn’t make children any safer, why does it matter whether they Google you or not? Do you fear some magic sort of contagion?

By: KCinDC

KCinDC — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 14:30:33 +0000

It seems to me you’re doing your part by cluttering up the search results with stuff that the sickos aren’t looking for, thus hindering their quest. And of course this post will temporarily distract them as well.

By: diddy

diddy — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 14:06:56 +0000

Or you could try not compounding the problem by putting all of the search terms together at the same link. Or, better yet, don’t acknowledge pernicious or degrading search terms at all. (That temptation has been awfully hard for a lot of bloggers to resist.)

By: DDD

DDD — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 09:58:26 +0000

You could try Google’s nofollow tags:

http://www.google.com/remove.html#exclude_pages

Methodology:

Edit the HTML for the relevant posts by adding nofollow tags.

Place the bulk of the relevant posts “under the tab” so that Google can still go into your archives but won’t index the offending text.

That should work.

By: William Sjostrom

William Sjostrom — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 08:00:46 +0000

Sadly, welcome to the club. Every time I write about any topic like this, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid language that attracts these people. It is very hard to do. As a big site, you presumable attract more of these people. You have my sympathies.