Hallo everybody,
Today I did a Google search to see how our twink site Spritzz is being ranked and I was pretty much irritated to find neither the term “Spritzz” nore the domain name “Spritzz.com” at the top of the results. I executed the Google command “site:spritzz.com” to see all direct links to pages of our site indexed by Google and there where - NONE.
At the bottom of the results page a link to Lumen database could be found with a rather vague explanation:
“A URL that otherwise would have appeared in response to your search was not displayed because that URL was reported as illegal under German youth protection laws.”
Well, with Spritzz originally being a German based studio which still is offering a German language version, my first thought was that most likely indeed a German authority must be behind that complaint. In Germany there is the “KJM - Kommission für Jugendmedienschutz” which I think one can say is the equivalent of the BBFC in the UK. Obviously these concerned Ladies and Gentlemen must have been busy under the radar since a while!
Digging further I found many well-known sites also NOT showing the earch results of the GERMAN Google version (meaning using a German IP):
belamionline.com
seancody.com
timtales.com
boyfun.com
helixstudios.net
(…)
Doing more testing, I switched my browser to a different country using another proxy server, luckily finding that all the studios above (incl. our own Spritzz) DID SHOW in Google search results again. To me this is another indicator that KJM is behind all this. Obviously their arm is pretty long as their complaints result in Google deindexing our sites from German search results even without the studios or website owners in question residing in Germany. Strange times!
Any fellow studios have been aware of this? Any ideas what to do?
Stay safe and sane!
Jame
Spritzz | Young Bastards