My site being filtered by SafeSearch (on Moderate) in Web results and Image results

Hi All,

My site: Strippers London

I am hoping somebody can advise me on which images on my site are triggering the Safesearch (on moderate) filter (on both web results and image results)? I believe the reason my site doesn't have an Instant Preview and has dropped considerably in the rankings (overnight) is because my site is being filtered by Safesearch.

My site does contain images showing semi-dressed men and women, but there is no full nudity, gentalia or nipples showing. My industry (strippers & kissograms) is full of similar sites with some identical images and I am the ONLY one of all my main competitors that is being filtered. Therefore, I conclude one or two of my images must be just a bit too much for the filter and I would like to remove them and replace them with Safesearch friendly images.

Therefore please can anybody advise me on any of the following:

1) Which images are triggering the Safesearch filter, bearing in mind other sites with topless males and girls in linguerie do not trigger the filter?

2) Is it possible for a competitor to have brought my site to the attention of the filter in anyway, as my site has been unchanged for 6 months and was seemingly filtered overnight? (I know Google says its ALMOST impossible for a competitor to affect my site, but that always leaves some possibility! And I have one competitor that would do anything to get me out of the way!!).

3) Could it be my content and not my images that are triggering the filter?

4) Am I right in thinking I should also check image filenames and ALT text for 'offending' words? Can anyone see any offending words, as I can't!

5) If I managed to remove the offending images would my site automatically be unfiltered after the next crawl? Or would I have to submit my site for consideration of some sort?

6) Could inbound links to the site be cause for filtering, even though I don't have control of them? I don't have any outbound links to filtered sites anymore, having removed the only one that was linking to another site that was being filtered on moderate. Could this have been why I was filtered, even though the link had been in place for 6 months?

7) I have also read that having my site hosted on shared hosting where other sites may contain adult content could have an affect? I did see a video by Mr Cutts saying this would only be a problem if a huge percentage of the sites on the same server were adult in nature. Is this still true? Should this be a genuine concern?

8) Could people hotlinking to my images from adult sites be a factor in my site being filtered?

I have posted this same question on the google webmaster central but haven't had a single response yet and only got one useless response from a previous question regarding the same matter! I know there will be more helpful people here!!

Thanks for any help in advance.

 

1) Which images are triggering the Safesearch filter, bearing in mind other sites with topless males and girls in linguerie do not trigger the filter?

Probably trust among other things that they will not show more than that. Make sure your pictures truly are not more racy than theirs. You may think they are the same but are subtle marketing minds always tell us to go big, so you might have girls showing a little bit more...

2) Is it possible for a competitor to have brought my site to the attention of the filter in anyway, as my site has been unchanged for 6 months and was seemingly filtered overnight? (I know Google says its ALMOST impossible for a competitor to affect my site, but that always leaves some possibility! And I have one competitor that would do anything to get me out of the way!!).

It is possible, although not likely. You can find out by looking at who is pointing to your site...

3) Could it be my content and not my images that are triggering the filter?
Yup

4) Am I right in thinking I should also check image filenames and ALT text for 'offending' words? Can anyone see any offending words, as I can't!

self-explanatory

5) If I managed to remove the offending images would my site automatically be unfiltered after the next crawl? Or would I have to submit my site for consideration of some sort?

All I can say here is that it will take lots of time, and you may want to re do the entire site, new code, fresh content etc etc

6) Could inbound links to the site be cause for filtering, even though I don't have control of them? I don't have any outbound links to filtered sites anymore, having removed the only one that was linking to another site that was being filtered on moderate. Could this have been why I was filtered, even though the link had been in place for 6 months?

Yes, bad things pointing to you lead to bad times with google.

7) I have also read that having my site hosted on shared hosting where other sites may contain adult content could have an affect? I did see a video by Mr Cutts saying this would only be a problem if a huge percentage of the sites on the same server were adult in nature. Is this still true? Should this be a genuine concern?

Yes and no, but with your site being adult in nature, it probably isn't helping.

8) Could people hotlinking to my images from adult sites be a factor in my site being filtered?
Absolutely, in fact, it is.

 

Thanks for taking the time to respond RazorbackJones.

On point 2 (and 6), when you say 'who's pointing to me', I presume you mean who's linking to me? Surely google can't penalise or filter a site based on who links to it, as it is out of their control and could easily be exploited by someone with an agenda or grudge against me (which one of my competitors definitely has!). I could submit my competitors site to various link farms and put him out of business then. Surely not? Or alternatively, if I told google my competitors site, with its similar images to mine, is showing up with the safesearch filter on (moderate), do you think they would manually filter that site, or would it be more likely they may use the info to change the algorithm only?

On point 3, what sort of words and content would flag as adult then? I have removed the word nude and sexy from most pages but surely google filters on a word density basis and not on the odd occurrence of 'adult' words? Whatever they actually are???

More worryingly on point 5, am I really better redoing the entire site? Surely the mechanism by which they filtered me will recognise it no longer needs filtering? This seems very extreme and not very 'fair'! I thought google were not meant to be evil? Money and power corrupts they say!

On point 8, are you saying you can confirm adult sites are hotlinking to me or are you just saying my point is fact? I have added hotlink protection via cpanel yesterday so hopefully it shouldn't be a problem again but I would be interested to see any sites that are hotlinking to me to test my protection.

OK, how do people think Google determine whether an image is of an adult nature then? If the surrounding text, alt text and filename are not adult orientated, how can they make that decision?

Another concern that has just occurred to me is that I do have a link to GTBill on my contact page. GTBill were the ONLY merchant account I could get as all the other companies (paypal et al) said my business was too high risk for them. Unfortunately, it appears GTBill supply, almost exclusively, merchant accounts for adult sites (proper porn sites in most cases) and their terms require a link back to them. Therefore, there are literally thousands of proper adult sites linking to GTBill and I am now another site who links to them. Could it be that I am being included in some bad neighbourhood, even though the GTBill site itself isn't considered adult? The more I think about it the more this seems EXACTLY the reason why I have been flagged as adult, but I don't understand how I could have gone under the radar for 6 months before google noticed! Could this be it???