Google Spanks The Little Guys

Dude, where's our porn? Or our sex blogs? It used to be that if we searched for sites like Eros Blog, Pretty Dumb Things, Good Vibes, Comstock Films, and (our own) Tiny Nibbles and Violet Blue, we'd get each of these sites in the top rankings or on the first page of results (SafeSearch off, natural results). But no more: apparently Google has been changing its search algorithms over the past few weeks, dropping many popular sex blogs and independent adult sites in the process. It seems to have coincided with certain changes they made relating to their keyword ad program AdSense, though the website for respected sex toy retailer Babeland was dropped first (and hard) before the holidays. Interestingly, searches for more "mainstream" (and big-business) sex and porn-related sites like Adam and Eve or Vivid (and Fleshbot, for that matter) turns up the expected results—but now all we get are secondary links and spam (splog) results when we search for the indie players on the sex blog scene, a development that cuts into their traffic and revenue. We just have to wonder, is this all part of Google's new abstinence-only program?* -V. Blue

· "Chronicle writer disappears in porn clampdown" (valleywag.com)
· "Will Google Kill Comstock Films?" (comstockfilms.com)
· "Google Delivers a Lump of Coal to Babeland" (blog.babeland.com)
· "google is broken" (tinynibbles.com)
· Image via Spanking Blog (spankingblog.com)

Update Well, things seem to be back to normal as far as Google is concerned (for now, anyway)—see update here.