Hello. One of my websites allows users to write 'reviews' for games. I don't currently have the resources/time to monitor every one of these, and I haven't yet implemented any 'bad word' filtering, etc. I'm curious if Google would penalize me if my pages have 'bad words'(cursing, etc.) on them? Maybe the child-safe adult content filter would filter my pages out of the main SERPs? Any thoughts? Thanks. -- Derek
Interesting question! My guess is "NO" but I'm curious what some of the gurus around here think Good luck, Mike
This is just my opinion, no idea if I'm correct or not. I think you're right that people who have set their web results to safe search may not see your pages and there for they won't have a chance to visit your site via related searches. Although I'm unsure of how many people actually specify to use safe web results on Google? I don't think google would penalize "bad" words as a rule, but if the game reviews are written poorly this may yield the same result as if you were being penalized. Knowing that some of the gaming community is far from mature (no offence to those of you who are) it's quite possible the bad language is a result of poorly written reviews. I'm assuming you get your members to write them for you? Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth. Anyone got any hard evidence to back up ideas?
Do a search for doodie toons at Google and see what shows up. Now go to your preferences and set SafeSearch Filtering to "Use strict filtering (Filter both explicit text and explicit images)" and try the search again. Guess what? It don't work. I would imagine it works on more explicit words. Basicly they do not punish, they can try to filter. Google is not a censor.
Google has Strict Filtering/Moderate Filtering/No Filtering, Moderate is selected by default. I suspect that the majority of users don't change the defaults. It looks like Google's Safesearch feature is for Adult content, not for bad language. http://www.google.com/help/customize.html#safe
Google default preference: Use moderate filtering (Filter explicit images only - default behavior) I believe this only creates a default filtering of the images search, not the "text" web search. Try a simple search for some adult topics after clearing your cookies and without setting preferences. Well I'm pretty sure it doesn't filter normal web results at all (for explicit, adult, or bad language) it requires a user to set that preference to "Strict".
seeing as how the "f" word is how lots of porn sites are found, and without that word on ==some== page online, its pretty hard to optimize for it, I don't think google would filter it. Now, make those pages invisible if you don't want 'adult' results, thats another story.
Yes you all are probably right. One or two occurances of a naughty word is probably not enough to trigger the filters. It is more like a combination of factors. Maybe if the cussing was really obscene and prevalent throughout the page such as a "your mama" conversation can get, that may trigger it. This may require further testing and verification. Any volunteers?