content filter on G

[sparky]

I know like all search engines, Google uses filters for various reasons. I am also aware that Google puts some weight on Yahoo, the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ. My question is if DMOZ lists you as an adult site, will it affect you in the SERPS for Google? Looking through my competition which is selling the exact same product, half of us are listed in the adult area of DMOZ, while the other half are not. Will the sites that are not classified adult be ranked higher than sites classified as adult, in the SERPS for the same keyword? Is there such a filter or are they just ranked better?

[incrediblehelp]

Could be, just not sure if anyone will be able to honestly answer you yes.

[wige]

I did some research into this about a year ago. What I was able to find out was that yes, Google uses DMOZ and other directory listing categories as well as internal algorithmic determinations to decide if a site would be categorized as adult. However, I have not been able to find anything that indicates anything more than a "perceived" impact on rankings, for lack of a better term.

As far as Google is concerned, as far as I have been able to determine, the adult label is only used to remove sites from SERPs if a user has SafeSearch turned on, however since this is on by default it can reduce your visibility. The SafeSearch filter is applied after the results set is retrieved from the index, and thus having your pages marked to be filtered would not affect your actual ranking.

Now, as I mentioned, there can be at least a simulated drop in rankings for sites that are perceived as adult. Because of the nature of these sites (and in some cases, simply being labelled as adult in certain directories) it may be difficult to obtain incoming links from certain sources, for example educational domains that Google loves so much. Also, many sites in this category have tried to get around the difficulties of link building through less than legitimate means in the past, which adds devaluations through penalties to links from some other link sources, with the effect that a site labeled as adult may not be able to achieve the rankings of an extremely similar non-adult site, even if the algorithm does not have any particular bias against those sites.

Now there is no way to know for sure if this is the case, or if the algorithm does have some built in bias for sites it sees as being adult, but I have not been able to find anything beyond rumors.