Curse words and SEO

[djbbiz]

Does anybody know what or if there is a SEO penalty for having curse words in the text of you site? This would be a non-sexual/non-porn site with just a rough edge.

[netstrife]

I doubt there is any penalty for curse words.

[djbbiz]

You may be right, but I don't see a lot of sites that have many 4 letter words and they obviously flag porn and sex sites not to come up unless you are searching for them, so I thought they might filter for various cuss words.

[jtrag]

Curse words/foul language and even spelling and punctuation can play a major role in the SEO of your website.

I do not recommend allowing foul language if you're planning on getting optimal search placement/traffic. It won't necessarily prevent your site from reaching top position in search engines and generating traffic, but it will definitely impact the results.

Hope this helps

[djbbiz]

Thanks jtrag, I assume if I were to mask the words such as "as$" or "$hit" or any other mix of #$%^ that that would work and not weaken my google position?

[tpw]

Why would you be concerned about Google if you are willing to cuss on your site. If people are offended by your crude language, they will likely not buy from you anyway, so even if Google did not penalize you, you would not get the sale anyway, would you?

I have only seen curses on one site that got a lot of attention. If I remember right, it was the rich jerk site. I guess his product did pretty well, but he did not rely on the search engines to get people to his site anyway. He relied mostly on his affiliates and JVs to push his product.