Do you think profanity in the content can harm a site's rankings?

[DavidCapital]

In my early 20's I authored an ebook that provides men with natural ways to improve their ahem... "bedroom performance".

I'm now in my mid 30s, and while it's not such an enthralling topic, the thing makes me 80 or so bucks a day on good days, and it actually works. I update the blog from time to time and build links to it on occasion from good sources.

I've carried my SEO knowledge to a more "reputable" business, but this project is still interesting to me, because it's fully mine. I am more interested in getting it to rank and convert than anything, but following the same techniques that are working to grow the other business, this one continues to tank.

Disavow bad links, prune thin content.. no difference. However, one thing I just noticed now are my search queries in the reports. When I first started blogging on this, I was real loose with my tongue, and spoke quite frankly (and dirty to various degrees). I'm much more refined and professional in how I write now. However, the queries I'm ranking for... a lot of d words, c words (in the sex sense)... sounds almost pornographic.

Think Google may be seeing this, and putting me lower in rankings or in some sort of lower level category because of it? Heard anything about google penalizing for profanity?

I guess in this time of authority and trust, that can hurt both of those... but I wonder if anyone's heard any actual confirmation of this or has any experience with this?

Thanks!

[DavidCapital]

That’s something I’ve seen. Credentialed folks taking up much more space in the first pages of the SERPS. I don’t have credentials, and will not be spending the time / money in that direction, but I see the advice in many of these higher ranking results, and it’s often used and abused / recycled info that doesn’t do the job, or outright incorrect (I know my stuff, not a hack job ;).

But yes, you bring up another concern of mine... Is what I AM unfixable.

Thing that gives me some light / hope are some of sites taking up high rankings are not credentialed at all either. One is a kid in his mid / late 20s who writes about SEO / Marketing and... random sex articles? I believe he’s a social / outreach / networking phenom though, has links from super high DA sources.

Get Roman and For Hims are obviously purely commercial, but have money for high ranking placement and to get MDs to write articles.

There are also several “pick up artist” and “alpha method” ”bro type sites” with no credentials, (and some with very little links built to them), ranking for mediocre content...

All this gives me hope to stay in there, but I’ve definitely seen the trend you’re mentioning here...

[EGOL]

We don't compete in your space, but we do have a site that competes by keyword overlap with sites that advise on alternative medicine.  The overlap consists of at least 100 keywords, many of which have a monthly volume of 10,000+

The comparisons of our site vs alt med sites are as follows...

university degrees and government-issued licenses   vs.   author panache and social cred

scientific terminology  vs.  common language (which has a higher search volume)

factual information  vs.  lore and creative writing

Over the past two years, on three occasions, we have received substantial improvements in rankings and traffic as the alt med sites have dropped.  I attribute it to Google wanting  the SERPs to be populated more with formal credentials and technical prose rather than with lore and panache.   We intentionally improved how our E-A-T is displayed about two years ago and I think that has been helpful.

In these situations, a person can only guess at what might be doing this, however, other sites similar to ours have seen the same improvements at the same times.

[DavidCapital]

Excellent insights... thank you for taking the time to look into this.

I like the analysis of the three groups... one concern I have is... what if I'm only ranking BECAUSE I'm using these dirty words... the higher authority sites such as WebMD etc. are controlling and taking over searches for the more technical verbiage. Also, big money brands such as Forhims etc. who can probably pay for massive link building campaigns and promotion.

What I would hope with this is that Google... especially with the new update that's supposed to concentrate on language, will see the similarities in the terms, and keep me there... however, I've seen that google can still be pretty straightforward when it comes to ranking for terms. You want to rank, you write it verbatim...

As to traffic, I was on a pretty good uptick of visits until October of last year, when there was a massive drop with the medic update... I'd say about 60 - 70% of my traffic. E-A-T was spoken about quite a bit.

The changes have been drops with each big update since then. Last time there was growth was after the long lull after penguin came into play, and I disavowed a ton of reciprocal links and shady links, and had a massive jump, a couple of years after that, when another major update came around (don't want to look at the analytics, but some time around 2015 -2016 I'd say)... since then though, mostly drops with a lot of the major updates.

But I get that feeling... they don't approve of something... trying to pinpoint what that is, and just began hypothesizing this may be it after seeing search terms I'm ranking for..

[EGOL]

Imagine the population of people who are interested in the bedroom topics that you have written about...  I think that they would fall into three groups...

1. people that enjoy the "dirty talk"

2. people who don't care about it - they just want to read the content

3. people who are put off by the "dirty talk" and don't share the content or even read it very far

I think that group 1 would continue reading if the language was cleaned up, but if the language was cleaned up group 3 might appreciate the content and read it and value it.   Google might have a similar view and discriminate against "dirty talk", unless the searcher has safe search turned off.  So cleaning the content up might improve rankings.

You said... "this one continues to tank".   What exactly does that mean?  A slow and steady ranking and traffic decline?  A slow and steady loss of traffic through external links?    Or have there been a small number of sudden drops in visitors, in rankings, in revenue?

If your answer is "slow and steady" then I would bet that much of the loss is coming from the increased competitiveness of the internet and the emergence of new competitors.   Anyone who owns a 15 year old site that has not been getting a lot of regular new content and existing content improvement is seeing this.

If the losses are small and sudden, then it could be algo changes at Google that is knocking the site because they don't approve of something.   Just speculations.