I'll try to make it back here to talk about this more later, but I have a lot of billing and collecting work to take care of today.

In the meantime I just want to mention that it's very important to listen* to what Matt Cutts has to say. At the same time, it's also very important not to believe what he's telling you. There's usually some good information to be gleaned from his talks and replies to questions, but the good stuff is usually more in what he chooses not to say and in the way he replies, and not so much in the words that come out of his mouth.

*I mean "listen" as in video/audio of him, like this recent clip...



For instance, in this clip he hands out the clue that having nofollow links to your site will not hurt your rankings. What the clue means, and what he does not say, is that Google expects you to have a certain amount of nofollow links out there pointing to your site. If you don't, you'll have an unnatural link profile and may get slammed by some part of their algorithm.

Google will never do it, but it would be very cool if they'd add a "When Matt Cutts says... > What he means is..." option to their online language translator.

Okay, back to work and |Simon| here.

Yeah, it took me awhile to figure out that they expect you to have some nofollow links on your pages. I stalk ...I mean follow Matt Cutts everywhere especially the Webmaster videos. Hmmm that's an interesting thought and explains why there seems to be 2 camps after every new video: the he's lying camp and the he said camp. The need to read between the lines seems to be the compromise ;-)

Quick note to make sure the point is clear...

Emphasis in quotes above added by me.

Yes, it's also important to use the nofollow attribute in certain kinds of links on your own site's pages.

However, the thing I want to be clear about is that you need to have links with the nofollow attribute in them pointing to your site from other people's sites.

Depending on your link profile the nofollow attribute should be in at least 2% of those links, but could go up to 5% or even 10-15% for some sites. And many of those kinds of links can be the ones with exact match anchors that otherwise can stack up too high and hurt you.

Okay, moving from the general to the specific for a minute...

Looking at your site, there seems to be almost 9% nofollow links, which is probably more than twice what you need. Also, the site appears to have about 1,200 backlinks, but over 900 of them are from just three domains with the other 300 spread over only 60 or so other domains.

Your keyword density for "cheap phone sex" is a little high on your main page. It used to be okay to be near 5% (like you are now), but today it's better to get it down to around 3-4%. Also, the exact match domain (EMD) penalty algorithm could be working against you, as those keywords also appear a lot more times in the page's underlying code and in a lot (too many) of the incoming links to your EMD site.

I haven't looked too closely at the free sites on your domain, but I did notice that some of the URLs are your domain with a directory like /phonesex/ plus a four-digit number. Too many index pages like that will seem like "doorway" pages, which is something that can also hurt you.

And actually, it may be that the Big G has been viewing the index pages of all free sites as doorway pages for several years now. Then on those pages add a whole bunch of outbound links to sites which link right back to that same page and I think you can see how Uncle G won't think that's a good thing.

That's all for now...gotta get some food inside me.

:)

Oh, Simon, you didn't have to do that, but thank you so very much! Having another set of eyes look at my stuff helps a lot.

It does look like an EMD penalty is in play. Now keep in mind I always ranked #1 for my chosen search terms throughout these Penguin and Panda updates. I didn't even know what an EMD was until late last night. It's good to get some confirmation from someone in the business.

It's a 14 year old site. So, I am removing every one of those free sites that look "doorway-y" and reassessing the archives which are the main reason behind that 5% keyword density.

Would it make more sense to move gallery pages into a blog? I submitted Fuckable Booty last year and was quite pleased with the results.

Now I am off to dinner. Thanks again Simon. Best of luck everyone.