Why Funny Or Die Has A Web Page For 'Gang Rape' Videos

Digiday has pulled the lid off a little-known but commonly used search engine optimization trick used by major media publishers such as Funny Or Die, Complex, Vice, Daily Motion and blip.tv: They have automated pages that are generated to respond to searches for "porn," "sex" and other more graphic searches.

Obviously, there is a huge level of background search activity for sexual content on the internet.

But it's weird that Funny or Die is the No.1 Google result for "sex" searches (click to enlarge image). It is not a porn site. The company earned that placement in Google because its content management system generates a "sex" section for incoming search requests from Google.

And Funny or Die has an auto-generated "gang rape" page, on which it serves ads for major brands like Kraft and TBS:

The content on those pages isn't necessarily about sex, either.

Funny Or Die COO Mitch Galbraith told DigiDay that the company isn't creating these pages on purpose:

“It’s not a strategy to optimize for those terms; those pages are created automatically ... The content itself is clean content; it’s just a function of the fundamental SEO our site does.”

Read the entire Digiday story here.