Why Build Websites Without Using Profanity?
Search Engine Profanity Filters
Certainly, the context of the word affects how strongly people react against its
usage. We can truly understand the context, but search engines cannot fully
understand. Google and other search engines have sets of filters to prevent
profanity. One example of how they do this is Google's "SafeSearch" filter.
Granted, this is disabled by default and is intended for filtering "sexually
explicit content", but individual can enable this feature. If your web pages
have sexually explicit words, images, etc., users with this filter enabled will
not see your web pages in the search results. Thus, these websites will lose
some traffic.
An Insight to Google's Thoughts on Profanity
While this might not tell what Google does with its search results, it does show
that Google implements profanity filters on their websites. Google's What Do You
Love website implements a filter into the search. To see this in action check
out this URL:
http://www.wdyl.com/profanity?q=
Try placing a profanity word after the "q=". You will notice that it returns
true, which indicates that it is a word that Google blocks.
Profanity Deterrence
Another element to consider is how likely users would be to click on your web
pages in the search results. Even if your web pages are not penalized for
profanity, it seems likely that a user would prefer to click on web pages
without profanity in their title or description. Certainly, some users would not
be deterred, but at least a few would choose another web page. It might be
because the user believes profanity creates a lack of trust or confidence in the
information. How many scholarly paper's use profanity? Not very many.
Relevance of Profanity
Finally, we should consider the relevance of profanity. The question is what
does profanity really add to the text. Typically, these words are not
descriptive. There are certainly excellent times to use these words, such as
grabbing someone's attention. However, if one has a sufficient vocabulary, these
words can be replaced and create the same effect without the possibility of
offending their users. Consider using the F word to add emphasis to something.
The word can be used in so many different ways. Google might see this word as a
keyword (if it is used often) and place your website in the same neighborhood as
other websites that use these words. Think of other websites that might use this
word frequently. Do you want your website associated with those websites?
Web Pages With Profanity Study
We did a brief study on web pages with profanity compared to web pages without
profanity. We paired each web page with profanity with another web page without
profanity with similar SEO analysis scores. We used the SEO analysis reports to
determine the keywords for each page. We actually found with a small but
significant margin that web pages without profanity ranker higher in the search
engine results for their keywords. One potential flaw with this study is that
the websites were not paired by similar keywords, which could simply mean that
the websites without profanity simply competed for keywords with less
competition. Future studies are needed to verify and detail these results.
