Google Safe Search and dog breeding

Google Safe Search is a setting you can enable at Google so that when you search their index you will not see any results they consider "adult". This presents a decision for certain businesses. They may have words in thier nomenclature that would otherwise be considered adult. I have heard a storry of an aviation company that was filtered by safe search becuase their website made repeated references to "cockpit".

I help more than a couple dog breeders with thier web sites, and they face a similar chanllege describing the female canines in thier programs. The BITCHES.

I have found that Google safe search should, and usualy can, tell from context that the dog breeder web sites are not adult. Breeders can use this word (within reason I expect) and their web site will not be filtered by safe search.

I have seen this in action, because one of my clients has the word on her front page. That page also ranks number one for a certain search phrase, with or without safe search on. In that case clearly the presence (in a lot of dog context) of a single use of the word did not get her removed from the search results when Safe Search was enabled.

Google thinks it is OK to refer to a female canine as a bitch on your web site. (The elephant in this room is that Google isn't the only search engine people use. But thats a different post.)

I am aware of websites that have major protions of their web site devoted to a listing of all the bitches their program, and the word is used in the URL for the section, and the banner on the top of every page in the section. These pages appear even with safe search on.

WAIT A MINUTE: Before you run out and paste the word all over your dog breeding website, keep these three things in mind:

1. The sites I reasearched are fairly carefully written, well established, dog breeding sites with more than a couple of pages of content. Density of keyword and quality of content may effect your results in ways I don't contemplate here.

1. Google can and does change the way they do things. What is true now, may not be true a year from now. (You should always look at the date on stuff you read anyway.)

1. If I am wrong, Google will not change the fact you were removed from Safe Search Results because I said it was ok to use the word. If you are worried and don't understand what I am writing about, maybe you should be careful.

To test my theory, you can try these two searches. They are sufficiently specific that I know the first result what will be... (today). I performed a Google search for these terms. Both search return a result in the top position which contains the word bitch. (The page referenced contains the word, not neccessarily the result listing.)

When I turn on Safe Search for the same seach phrase, the result I am looking at does not change.

The phrases are :

• Cash stud New York desire
• Alexis Anka Babe Breeding Program

Try those out, look at the page in the results, and then turn on Safe Seach (you find that under the "Advanced Search" Link, under the "More" link there.) You should see that the same listing appear even though the pages contain the word and Safe Search is on.