Matt, There is a big problem with google suggest at the moment. This affects any adult brand. It harms searchers because they get misdirected, it harms legitimate brands who have built trust and
generate much of their traffic through repeated branded searches, it benefits scammers/spammers/domain sqatters
and it hurts google because it erodes trust in google. Lets take a look at one example: AdultFriendFinder.com. They're one of the mosted visited sites in the US. Many users will visit it by search for [adultfriendfinder]. Lets say they start off and get to: "adultfriend" Looks like google strips out "known" adult searches, so instead google suggests: adultfriender Lets add another F "adultfriendf" Google suggests: adultfriendfi As you can see, google is suggesting spelling mistakes and spelling mistake domains which are seemingly held by domain squatters (adultfriendfinfer.com redirects to a paid search page linking to the sites the user was clearly looking for anyway), and are clearly not the intended destination of the searcher. These spelling mistake sites are now getting serious amounts of traffic, up significantly (like, 1000x -- many brands are losing up to 10% of their traffic to these sites) since google suggest went live on most google properties. So, the brand loses out, the squatter/scamm/spammers gain revenue and the user is just totally confused. Can I suggest a simple change to fix this. If the #1 result in google suggest would have been an adult branded site or adult branded search term, google suggest should not display anything. There are many 100s of other examples I'm aware of in this sector that follow the above example. Yours,
A concerned searcher. |