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So What's Changed?
Over the last week or so there has been talk in several places about the changes that Google has suddenly decided to make to its listings that involved adult terms. As some have suggest perhaps what we are seeing is Google doing its own little bit to censor the Web ... and we thought that they would only do that in China.

On the other hand of course it could be simply trying to make every single cent it can from the adult online industry because it certainly is still putting paid listings right up there on the top of relevant search engine results pages (SERPS).

In case you haven't noticed the change and you're wondering what on earth I'm waffling on about just type the word 'porn' (unadorned with inverted commas) into Google and look at the results. At the very top for the first SERPS there are two paid listings of an adult nature and then you don't hit a genuine porn site until position 9.

Positions 1 to 8 of the organic listings on that page are taken up with listings for newspaper articles about how much porn is or isn't on the Net, a television program that investigated the growth of porn in the United States and an newspaper article about the FBI's porn squad. There are also a couple of sites that want to take advantage of the 'p' word to get a listing for an extremely popular term as well.

So what happened to all the other listings that used to be there? Penis Bot - the link list - used to be right up there at the top as did several TGPs and together with Penis Bot they had ruled that page for years. Now they're gone and I can't believe that a change in the algorithm could have removed them and replaced them with non-adult sites.

No, changes like that just don't happen unless Google has decided to either do a little moral crusading of its own ... or has decided to try and make more money from adult than they have been making.

Do corporate entities engage in moral crusading? Not in my experience.

Do corporate entities display greed and avarice and want to make every buck they can? Absolutely - that's what big business is all about!

Don't give up!
But all is not lost ... at least not yet. There are still plenty of multiple word listings out there that are going to attract a lot of adult traffic and Google hasn't moved to monetize those listings just yet. 'Hot porn' for example is still showing nothing but adult listings.

Of course that's not going to be as good a search term as 'porn' is/was but then it's definitely a listing that you can make money from. For several years one of my old sites spent almost every month as either number one or two for that term and the sales from that site alone kept up the lease payments on a very nice limo.

So, while Google may be making a move towards extracting more money from the adult industry, don't give up hope. There are a lot of multi-word terms out there that are attracting lots of searches and you can still make money by scoring a good spot on the SERPS for those terms.

If you're wondering what exactly is a 'good spot' then the bottom of page one of the SERPS is not good enough. You really do need to work hard to get your site into the top four and you also need to craft a great meta description tag that will attract the people who are looking at that SERP.

If you're not sure what multi-word terms you should target spend a little time jotting some terms down on a piece of paper. Then wander over to google.com/trends and use the tool there to see which of the terms you've chosen are getting the most searches.

You could also use Overture but these days I think that Google Trends will give you a clearer picture of which terms are attracting the most interest. While your're playing there don't forget to run a few variations of the terms you are interested in.

A friend of ours found that a slight variation in a term had the potential to bring a lot more traffic than the original term he had thought of. You shouldn't ignore plurals either and perhaps even shuffle the words in the term around a little. Google Trends will soon show you which terms are the best to use.

When you've finished with Google Trends go over to Google itself and do a search for the terms you have chosen so that you can see what your competition looks like. Don't be overawed by it though, it's quite possible to beat the big guys at the search engine game if only you take the time.

Don't think you can do it? Then you better forget about search engine traffic right now because it doesn't come easily and you do have to work for it ... but it's not impossible to and it definitely is worth the effort you will have to put in to get it.