Google Inc. has backflipped on its decision to ban publicly viewable sexually explicit material and graphic nudity on its blogging service Blogger.

The decision to implement the ban, despite sexually explicit material and graphic nudity being on Blogger going back to before Google acquired the service in 2003, was unsurprisingly not well received by a significant number of users.

“This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy “Google’s Social Product Support Manager Jessica Pelegio said on the Blogger support page (via Engadget.) “We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities.”

“So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.”

Pelegio added that blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as “adult” so that they can be placed behind an “adult content” warning page.

The backflip is a wise decision from Google following the previously absurd and unjustified decision to ban this sort of content earlier this week.

As we wrote at the time, the original move could “only be seemingly based on some sort of newfound moral position, although clearly one of Google’s morals here isn’t to support the free speech of its users.”

Why announce it then backflip? we may never know but clearly the morality police at Google have been shown that sex isn’t all that bad after all.

There will be one big loser from the backflip however, and that’s the Marissa Mayer run Yahoo Inc, who would have been salivating at the prospect of attracting tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of refugees from blogger to its competing platform Tumblr.

photo credit: Barbados Flip via photopin (license)