Plastic Surgery as Porn

It's a little known fact, but Google thinks most plastic surgery sites are pornographic.

It's true. They haven't talked about it much, but sites that display nude images, even clinical before and after photos, without a warning, may be classified as having "adult content." If your site is assigned this classification, YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS WILL SUFFER. It appears that at least Google and AOL are limiting how sites with adult content will appear among their search rankings. If your site is givent his label, it may only, or primarily, be returned when the search is pornographic in nature.

You'd think there would be more talk about this, since Google's adult content filtering has been a problem since early 2003 (see this searchday article).

We originally uncovered the problem with Google's pay-per-click program, adwords. The had assigned the adult content classification to a plastic surgeon we work with, and as a result their ads only appeared when the searches were largely pornographic. As you can imagine, it burned through a lot of money and delivered few high quality leads.

That's why we recommend:

1. Refrain from using nude stock images in your design;
2. If you are showing before and after photos on your home page or procedure pages, discretely place a bar over breasts and genitals; and
3. When you are about to deliver someone to a page that contains nudity or graphical content (such as intra-operative photos) display a polite warning, giving people the opportunity to back out before you fill their screen with nipples or gore.

The idea is actually polite. It allows you to split your site between the content for general audiences, and the content that is best left to adults. In that way you can work with filters that are trying to discourage access to adult imagery, rather than having them work against you.