LOS ANGELES — Google launched its fourth Penguin update Wednesday night, affecting the search visibility for various genres of websites, including those with porn content.
In an initial analysis of sites that have been affected the most, the SEO software company, SearchMetrics, found eight of the top 25 sites affected were porn sites, according to searchengineland.com.
SearchMetrics crunched the data using what it calls its “SEO Visibility” criteria, which looks at the visibility of a company’s web pages as they appear across a range of keywords in Google’s search results.
The eight porn sites on the list of 25 included pornhub.com, tube8.com, xhamster.com, largeporntube.com, bangyoulater.com, extremetube.com, 4bang.com and kporno.com.
Between them, the porn sites will lose between 25 and 40-percent of their previous SEO visibility at least for the keywords that SearchMetrics tracks, the report said.
In a blog post from SearchMetrics founder Marcus Tober, he said the impact from this latest Penguin update is smaller than he expected.
"It’s not the update I was expecting," he wrote. "I thought that this Google Penguin update would have had a bigger impact similar to Panda 1. ... My first analysis shows that many thin sites, sites with thin links and especially untrusted links face the problem."