I am experiencing Odd search engine behavior when searching for my BHZ image.

[Johnnie5]

Try searching for the keyword sex, or keywords including sex, logged in and not logged in.

 

wim

Good find Wim.  Seems like the word sex could be used in many contexts and shouldn't be censored.  I think there should be a notification that some words are censored on Alamy.

[wiskerke]

 

 

Try searching for the keyword sex, or keywords including sex, logged in and not logged in.

 

wim

Good find Wim. Seems like the word sex could be used in many contexts and shouldn't be censored. I think there should be a notification that some words are censored on Alamy.

 

 

I'm not sure it's a good idea to tell that out loud. My guess is that this is a sort of workaround; or quick fix.

 

wim

 

edit: actually I think it's a pretty clever trick. Maybe test how the competition handles this tricky problem. The problem being: SEO and having sensitive content.

[CLSI]

Wiskerke wrote:

 

edit: actually I think it's a pretty clever trick. Maybe test how the competition handles this tricky problem. The problem being: SEO and having sensitive content.
 

------

 

I see. Being largely ignorant of SEO techniques and problems, it hadn't occurred to me that having sensitive content might be an issue. I happen to be in a position to test the competition, and I find that one agency (which shall remain nameless) returns 120,885 results for "sex" when I'm logged in and 120,659 when I'm not. Another (also nameless--what are the odds?) returns 53,402 whether I'm logged in or not. I have no idea what the implications are of this, just tossing the data out there for others to munch on.

[Alamy]

Jonnie5 - what a lovely photo that is! Urgh.

Your image contains swearwords in the keywords and we’ve made a change to the site to block certain search words from showing up if you’re not logged in. 

We’ve done this because it reduces the risk of unwanted traffic from Google and helps to optimise our position in Google search results. They are all seen by logged in customers.
 
We’ve been working to increase our visibility on search engines and, in particular Google. An important part of this is making sure that our images appear in Google Image search.

Google has a concept of Safe Search which helps reduce the likelihood of pornographic or offensive images appearing in the search results. Sites that are regarded as being unsafe are less likely to be indexed and won’t feature in results. So, we’re doing what we can to avoid Alamy.com being marked as unsafe.   
 
When Google’s web crawler comes to Alamy and looks at our pages of images, it’s seen by our search engine as a user who isn’t logged in.
 
It would be impossible for us to go through all of our images and mark each one. So we have a list of control words which, if they appear in the keywords and caption, means that image is excluded from the search results if you’re not logged in.

 

Cheers,

 

Alamy

[CLSI]

Thanks Alamy (and points to Wim for identifying the issue)--now it all makes sense. I'm definitely in favor of having our photos turn up early in Google Images searches. If that means un-logged-in customers miss a few of my more risque images, on the balance, that seems a small price to pay.

[Johnnie5]

Thanks for the reply Alamy, so glad you like my photo.    When you own five large dogs you become not exactly a connoisseur so much as an appreciator of a good solid bowel movement especially when you are the official picker upper.  It seems like a good policy that Alamy has, but maybe a notification somewhere in the website that some images may be excluded when not signed in would be in order, with a warning of course that explicit material may be seen in some searches.  I am assuming that this situation also applies to customers.