Right now I’m choosing keywords to use on Lovingly Handmade Pornography, and it’s surprisingly tough. I’m using a tag cloud in the main nav area that looks something like this:

tag cloud

Let’s take bad-things-happening-to-girls-private-parts, something near and dear to my heart. Narrow that down further to impact-related bad things. If I were aiming for sheer correctness, I’d build a hierarchical system starting with ‘genital impact’, then ‘cunt’ and ‘asshole’ under ‘where’, ‘stingy’ and ‘thuddy’ for ‘type of sensation’, then maybe ‘hand’ vs ‘implement’ (possibly subdividing further into types of implement). Unfortunately, that is *so* much more detail than anybody wants, and really doesn’t communicate well at a glance.

So what I’ve ended up doing is using ‘cunt spanking’ (for open hand), and ‘cunt beating’ (for closed hand, implements, etc). That’s nice and simple, does a great job for most of what I need. Except… I’m not sure how immediately obvious it’s going to be to anyone else what the distinction between those two is. More importantly, it completely fails to address alternate terms for search engines. The site will probably not rank for ‘pussy whipping,’ even though oh boy is there a lot. A person visiting will see ‘cunt beating’ and know they’ve found what they wanted, but a search engine isn’t going to bring them.

I almost used ‘asshole beating’ for consistency, but there were two problems there. One, I did a quick Google search, and came up with a whole bunch of stuff involving people-who-act-like-jerks and violence. Okay, let’s try ‘anus beating’, or ‘anus spanking’- that’s got clearer meaning. That’s when I ran into the second problem- my tag cloud is alphabetical, and ‘anus’ sorts even before ‘assfucking’. Thus, that’s the first thing someone sees, and it requires enough thought to interpret that they don’t read down any further.

I went with ‘rosebud beating’, but that sounds sort of silly and new-agey and isn’t going to get me much search traffic. Maybe I’ll change it to ‘spanking anuses’.

You laugh, but I agonize about this stuff.

I’ve actually put quite a bit of thought (and coding) into this over the last few years. I wrote what I think is the best implementation of faceted browsing on any porn site anywhere for the House of Gord sites, bringing in a library science geek with a masters degree to help design the taxonomy. I think that keywords on a porn site serve four distinct purposes:

a) navigability; make it so people can find the stuff they’re interested in (“Oooh, cunt spanking! Show me those.”)

b) filtering; make it so people can look at a specific update/picture set/video/whatever and quickly decide whether they want it (“This one says crying, that’s scary. Here’s one with assfucking, yay!”)

c) summarizing; make it so people can tell at a glance what the site’s about (“I never knew there were so many ways to describe spanking…”)

d) structuring; make it so search engines can spot the keywords and list the site in relevant searches.