Google Problems and Podcasting Porn

Google’s backup, backup ’server’.

I’ve been insanely busy this week.

It reminds me of the time I was chosen as a last minute fill-in for a heavyweight boxing championship fight. Despite being a rank outsider, little known outside Philly where I was living at the time, I trained hard and went into the ring ready to give it everything I had. My opponent turned out to be the better boxer, but I had heart and won by a knockout in the last round. The moment when my wife ran into the ring to congratulate me was the greatest of my life.

You might have heard about it.

What’s been keeping me busy, and happy, is my first podcast. After bitching about the lack of decent sex-themed podcasts I’ve decided to put one together myself. As I’m determined to make it worth listening to, I’ve spent a lot of this week thinking about how to structure it, how to record it, and how to prevent it from being an amateurish waste of time.

I have quite a lot of experience recording audio (I held the boom on the Pam and Tommy Lee video shoot) and am working on a ‘better podcasting’ post. I’ve listened to a lot of them and to say the average quality is bad would be accurate. (I still wish there were more sexy podcasts about so be sure to let me know about any you find.)

What’s been keeping me busy, puzzled, and frustrated has been Google. My babelog, PSPporn, is completely absent from their listings (as of the time of writing). As an expert on the whole adult web thing it bothers me that I don’t know why (yet).

Technically Google might not have got round to finding the blog, it’s less than 60 days old, but they’ve found all of these references as well as links into the site from other major blogs (including the mighty Fleshbot). Unless their bots broken they’ve seen plenty of links in. Even this blog should make a difference, it’s new but well indexed and has a decent pagerank.

More curiously, results for the key phrase ‘PSP Porn’, find PSPporn at #1 at MSN and #4 at Yahoo!

Asking Google if they have even a single page from the site indexed shows nothing at all. As far as they’re concerned it doesn’t exist.

I’ve got to conclude the PSP Porn’s on some sort of blacklist. It’s a first in my experience, and I’m as interested as why it happened as I am in how to fix it. I thought the Google ‘blacklist’ was mostly urban myth.

I don’t believe in ‘Search Engine Optimization’ beyond making pages clear and well formed. The big three do a great job of finding relevant pages, and I have no desire to draw in surfers who aren’t interested in what my pages offer. That viewpoint means there’s plenty I don’t know about Google which I’m now having to learn. It’s dull but I’ll share it with you when I’ve worked things out. If there are any experts reading this feel free to school me.

Ironically, I was working on a post explaining why the best Search Engine Optimization is none at all when my Google problem became obvious.

(If you’ve read this far and have any requests for future podcast content let me know - you’re hardcore and I want to hear what you have to say)