UPDATE: Google Search Cleans Up It’s Porn Link Problem!
In the fall of 2022, I was starting to help my wife with her dating event company, when I discovered a massive problem with Google search.
I wrote this article here:
https://dgudema.medium.com/porn-links-on-google-hey-googles-sh-t-does-stink-e40790e6fdb5
We were fighting it out with 3–4 porn and other unscrupulous dating companies who were hijacking WordPress sites, and turning those sites into landing pages for porn. It was a pretty ingenious scam. My problem was they were taking up valuable ad space that our company and competitors needed to get daters into events.
The way it worked was a WordPress plugin was added by the customer website and unbeknownst to them, it would generate hidden web pages with SEO, targeting the keywords “speed dating”. It looked like it was AI-generated, or better yet screen scraped from the Google search itself based on the keywords and then mashed up. Instead of these pages going to events, a click sent them to hard porn. But the real technical smarts here was that if you visited the landing page from Google it redirected to porn, but if you visited the web page directly, it did not go to porn, nor did it show any porn links. The content, links and HTML was all generated via javascript, so they were able to totally confuse WordPress admins. Inside WordPress you probably did not see this web page at all. It was a brilliant scam that was delivering tons of impressions and clicks on the backs of unknowing site owners.
At that time I started to fight back. I contacted the website owners and let them know. That did not help. They were helpless. I contacted the hosting companies. I contacted the domain companies. These people were hopeless.
There is a page where you can send the listing/link to Google directly to report them. I sent in about 30 links and got no response. I waited 30 days, no answers. I tried several other ways to report them to Google, and all those methods were unfruitful. So that is when I started to write about this problem on Medium in this article:
https://dgudema.medium.com/porn-links-on-google-hey-googles-sh-t-does-stink-e40790e6fdb5
All I could do is try to get someone at Google’s attention. I even sent the problem to a Google Search exec on Linkedin. Got no response.
So about 2 months into this debacle I decided to do something out of the box, something that a few friends said could completely backfire on me. It could have gone several ways, and one of those ways could have resulted in becoming persona non grata with Google Search, something I want to avoid.
I did a simple search and was able to find every division executive at Google, presidents, general managers, vice presidents. It was like 15 people. I then went onto Twitter and looked up their Twitter/X handles.
I made a series of Tweets mentioning the problem exactly with graphics and included the handle of all 15 execs. I noticed that about 7 were female. Even if they were not in charge of search at Google, I figured there would be a meeting where one exec would bring this problem up with the rest of the Google execs. It was a bold strategy. I would not be surprised if they pulled up my articles and tweets on the big screen in the big Google conference room in the sky!
I am so busy, I moved on to all the work I do that winter and forgot about this issue, because ultimately in 2023 at some point Google or WordPress eliminated this scamming AI SEO practice, so it is not happening anymore.
I believe some rational lady exec at Google saw porn and said “Fix it buddies or I am going to the president”. Sometimes you have to be a bull in a china shop, break a few items in the shop to get the right person’s attention. Thank you person who cared! I don’t need to know who you are, but just saying I called out and you heard me! Google is not all evil or silent and there are humans who work there who have some self-respect!
So, I have to thank the Google execs I contacted for taking action. I know they did in the end, because who wants the company they work for to send unsuspecting speed daters to porn sites… That’s not good for anybody.
Anyway, glad once again you read my article on medium. I am still at it with several ventures and running pitch events.
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