Apparently Porn CAN Sneak Into Random Searches

It seems sort of ironic on the heels of the Google v the DOJ court case, but just this morning I had an email from search engine marketing expert Bill Hartzer asking me if I'd taken a look at the Yahoo! search results for the phrase "website marketing." I hadn't, so I did. It turns out, that this search is a great example of the fact that every now and then, "adult content" does find its way into generic search results.

On the Yahoo! listing, the number one site is KissMoose.com. Now, KissMoose.com used to be a site focused on website marketing. A quick trip over to the Internet Archive shows that through several redesigns, the focus of the content was always on how to market your site on the Internet. It's also fairly easy to see in later iterations that it was clearly targeting the phrase website marketing. (Which would explain why the domain also shows up when you run an allinanchor search on Yahoo.)

So what happened? Well, a Whois check shows that the same person has owned the domain since 2003 and that the last change made to the registration was just a few weeks ago. That could mean any number of things...

1.) The owner decided that he received a decent amount of traffic from his rankings but that it was time to put some different content on the site.

2.) The domain has been hijacked.

3.) The owner is testing to see if Yahoo! is really paying attention.

I'm not sure exactly what's going on with the listing, but I will be interested to see if it sticks around for very long. Lest you think Yahoo! is the only engine having problems picking up the new content, know that Google also ranks the new content of the site for this phrase, though it's buried a few pages deep there.

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