The overlap between tech and porn: an overlooked element in search optimization

If you search for “multiplayer sex game” (and a number of variations on these words) on Google, this blog comes up #1.

In April 2006 I wrote a blog post Massively multi-player sex games, which discussed the launch of Naughty America: The Game, an MMORPG involving sex. As far as I can tell my predictions of great success for the game were wrong, though other similar players such as Red Light Center, which is essentially SecondLife involving graphic sex, powered by Utherverse, seems to be doing very well.

Partly due to my blog’s prominence, and I gather due to some links from Chinese websites, this blog post, three years later, is still deemed by Google to the most authoritative source on the topic, and the post consistently gets more traffic than many of my other long-term hits such as our Web 2.0 Framework and Extinction Timeline (though most of those visitors to these latter posts tend to stay and browse a lot longer).

For a long time I thought this was nuisance traffic. If someone is searching for multiplayer sex games, they are unlikely to be the audience I want for my blog. A couple of years ago when I was speaking on a panel I used the story to make the point that not all visitors to a blog are equally desirable.

However I then noticed that a significant proportion of visitors – in fact close to 20% – were staying to read more of my blog, sometimes spending over 10 minutes browsing around. It turned out that (some of) the sex game-seeking visitors were not single-minded, but could be distracted by insights into strategy and technology.

Further light on this has now been shed by Sam Niccolls of SEOMoz in a post on TechCrunch Upskirt: Why Michael Arrington Blogs about Porn.

Image source: SEOMoz

A few excerpts from Sam’s instructive article:

In the last year alone, TechCrunch made over 550 blog posts with the word porn in body of the post…. Newsworthy or not, TechCrunch blogs about porn when they have the opportunity.

Based on monthly search volume, if you assume industry average SERP click through rates, it’s not unreasonable to estimate that TechCrunch generates over a quarter million visits a month from x rated queries.

TechCrunch also optimizes porn posts for users, not just search engines. Often they do this by including mildly risque above the fold images in blog posts.

While there is an obvious justification to bringing traffic to the advertising-laden Techcrunch site, for click-throughs, to boast about unique visitors to potential advertisers, and to gain Google-juice, the fact is that people looking for porn may also be interested in Techcrunch. In fact, as the diagram above suggests, the overlap may be almost complete :-).

Techcrunch clearly knows it, and writes in such a way to benefit from it. Some websites wouldn’t benefit at all from porn search traffic (knitting sites for example), however other sites could well draw in people who were originally looking for something else. Tech sites are among those with the biggest overlap in readers.

So, what’s your porn search optimization strategy?