There's nothing inherently wrong with reciprocal linking. If I link to you one day because I like what you wrote, and then you link to me two months later because you liked something I said, that kind of reciprocal linking happens often and its not a problem.

It's also not about relevance; it's about intent: why are two sites linking to each other? If its an exchange to boost traffic or increase brand awareness, Google's recommendation is to tag the link with nofollow. If its an exchange to improve search engine ranking, then Google's recommendation is, again, tag it with nofollow.

Using nofollow is a last resort. A smarter approach is to reduce the chance of detection by making links look more organic.

As spacemanpiff said, Google doesn't mind a moderate level of exchanged links. If a large percentage of your IBLs is organic, a few link trades aren't going to hurt you.

If you want to take a conservative approach, you might try emulating a directory-type layout. For example:

"http://www.business.com/directory/accounting/employment/"

Still, you might not see any improvement until Google is convinced the entire network is clean.

Though artifical links like cat-page links are potential problems, I think a bigger problem is the lack of organic links. Many mainstream sites rank using artifical links but they also have natural links as a supporting backbone to create a balanced link profile. We don't have that luxury.

Msnaughty has a few exchanged links (blogroll, links to free sites, sugasm links). On the other hand, forthegirls don't link out, and it ranks on the first page for its target keyword.

My understanding is that if you tag a link with "nofollow" then it will not improve search engine ranking. Is that not the general consensus?

I was thinking of this site: www.sexforwomen.net

It only has one link exchange and is made primarily of articles. I haven't changed it in ages, and it's probably overoptimised. It's also guilty of interlinking between my own sites. This site is on page 10 for numerous keywords.

There was a time, way back in the distant past, when it was number 1 for a quite a few phrases.

I'm thinking I need to go and nofollow all my own links to see what happens.

I'm not too sure that that site would be a good example as far helping to further our discussion regarding whether the old way of exchanging links could be hurting us. Just the fact that it hasn't been changed (updated, I assume you mean?) in ages is enough to get it buried. The interlinking between your own sites could also support the theory that you might be penalized as part of a network.

Where have you folks derived this theory, which you have repeated a number of times, that being part of a network is the source of the problems?

Has Cutts or google said something specifically that leads you to think this?

I haven't been able to follow the logic that it's the networks that are responsible, when the other factors that google has emphasized (anchor text, too high a percentage of reciprocals, lack of oneway incomings) are all so clearly a big part of the recent model of adult linking.

Yes Bill, Matt Cutts has said that being part of a network/link farm will get you penalized by google.

In Google's help area it states:
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

I think it's pretty obvious that a network of somewhere between 50 to 100 sites, where most of them interlink all of their categories with most of the other sites in that group, could be determined to be a link scheme designed to increase rankings in the serps.

There is no doubt that some form of penalty or flag has been applied to alot of the pages of the sites within this group that we are all discussing. I've already spelled out earlier in this thread how to determine that...matter of fact, I've done it twice in this thread.
Now, we're all trying to determine what caused these penalties...

Yes, but thats very old.

You seem to be saying you have some new reason to believe that the linking thats been going on has either been (1) newly marked by google as somehow illegitimate, or (2) has somehow changed or grown to the point where it is hurting everybody when it used to help.

I was just wondering if there is some new reason you think this?

You said "it's no doubt that its a penalty".

I think it's just as likely that it's simply the way the new algos score and therefore rank a site.

I haven't seen yet a good piece of evidence that it's a flag or a penalty.

I understand you guys think it's a penalty, but I don't think you can claim that just because you are suddenly dropped in the serps, that it's caused by a penalty, when a algo change in ranking determinates is just as possible, and given what I think we know about google, more likely.

When I ask this question about networks, I'm asking, do you have some new evidence that it's networks, and not the other more publicized factors, that are causing this.

For all I know you have good evidence - I just haven't seen it, or heard anything that I think supports it, yet.

I think this question of networks is of critical importance, so I want to keep on asking certain questions about it, questions that very much determine the tactics and strategy of solving this problem for we adult businessmen.

If the crash in rankings is a matter of networks, then:

(1) Why aren't some of the TGPs being affected?

(2) Where could one position a adult sites like ours without being in a network?

(3) If ALL clusters of sites (for example grandma scrotums modest little personal network) are now networks that google penalizes, how could one ever escape networks?

(4) If some networks are worse than others, how could you possibly tell which network is good and which one is bad?

(5) I'm fully aware that you have a network, as do most of us here in this conversation. Why do you believe that google would decide your network is good, but someone elses is bad?

I think question 2 is the most important tactically. How would it be possible to create a profitable adult site that isn't somehow tied to a network?

If just creating a standalone domain with no "risky" links to possibly bad networks was enough to grab #1s again, why do you think we haven't all discovered this already?

Is the "distant past" around 2002? There were some interlinking tricks that worked back then that will get filtered out nowdays.

Bill, I don't have all the answers...wish I did. I'm throwing ideas up for discussion. I'm fairly convinced that there is a penalty that alot of our (meaning that group of sites that all interlink) sites are suffering from. When you look at the back of the index, you'll see alot of pages from most of those sites buried there. If you look at alexa's traffic details, you'll see that alot of those sites all fell about the same time.

Whether it's a penalty, or an algo change, we all need to try to figure it out and try to get out from under it.

My company still has sites/pages that do very well with google. We are trying to be pro-active and working to keep those sites/pages from falling. Of course, we've lost placements too and we're trying to get those back.

My best guess regarding an answer to your question #2 is that our (I'm referring to everyone's sites, not just the ones that we own) little group of 100 or so Link Lists are certainly not the only adult sites on the 'net. We barely scratch the surface. We have, however, all placed well in the past for lots of terms. Linking outside of our network is certainly necessary. Finding sites within this network that have been buried, are not being cached by google, have not been updated by the webmaster for a long period of time, etc and ending link exchanges with these folks is probably not a bad idea.

It's a trial and error thing. We can't just sit still and hope that placements come back. That said, the "Chicken Little" syndrome will not help anyone here. Open discussions, bouncing ideas back and forth, and trying new strategies seem to be what's called for.

Nofollow is a way to shield you from penalties. Google does not need them to detect artificial links.

You can also use nofollow to tweak PageRank flow through internal links. By spreading out PageRank to a targeted set of pages, you exert some influence over which pages Google includes in the main index.

1) Competition increases over time. If a site doesn't continue to gain inbound links, it will eventually be outranked.

2) A gradual loss of ranking is different from a sudden drop in ranking.

3) The site is 108 pages big, but I only see 8 pages in the main index. The reason is simply that you don't have many strong IBL to the domain. (e.g. "http://d.sankey.ca/blog/322/there-is-a-tv")

4) I agree the on-page text is over-optimized ("Sex for Women, orgasms, clit pumps, g spots, female ejaculation, anal sex, vibrators, adult videos, better sex, centrefolds")

Bill, no one is claiming that being part of a network is why people get smacked over the head with the 950 penalty. I'm not even claiming that the penalty exists. All I'm saying is that being part of a network makes artificial links much easier for Google to detect. And considering the fact that linking violations incur the harshest penalties, its something worth keeping in mind.

Rankings shift daily across various DCs. That shift might be due to several factors, including 1) a dramatic algo upgrade, 2) data refresh, 3) PageRank shift, 4) increase in competition, or 5) a penalty.

When a site that was ranking #1 for "free porn" suddenly plummets to 870th, you can rule out 4 because 870 urls aren't going to suddenly outrank you over night. You can rule out 2 because data refreshes usually will not lead to a loss of 870 positions. A PageRank shift (3) that knocks thousands of pages into the supplemental index is a possibility, but if your site has at least TBPR 5, you should not see huge fluctuations in the number of pages in the main index. As for #1, these days I don't expect Google to unleash monumental algo upgrades; its more likely that Googlers tweak their algo on different DCs so that you see slightly different results on different datacenters.

I'm not claiming that msnaughty.com, for example, is penalized, but I think the chances of it not being penalized is close to nil.

It's ok to link into a network as long as the link is editorial. And it's also ok to get a link from a site belonging to a network as long as the link is editorial.

Yeah, I know, the problem with us is that its unnatural to link to our competition, and everybody is our competition. But blogs are changing all that.

Relevance and signals of quality. If everybody linked to sites they liked, there would be no bad neighborhoods. One thing to keep in mind is that adult webmasters aren't our only source of IBLs.

Bill, no one suggested you'll rank #1 by building a domain and not linking to crap. You obviously need people linking to you to rank.

Since Halfdeck keeps using MsNaughty as an example, even though I didn't ever want to mention that domain in this thread (I don't want to be considered a "bad neighbourhood" LOL), I'll say this. The link exchanges I have going on there don't seem to constitute a bad neighbourhood as such, since almost all of the sites I've exchanged links with rank well. There are two that seem to have joined me on the last page, but overall my "neighbourhood" seems to be OK.

So should I get rid of those two links? I don't want to. They're good sites and relevant too. And I link my link exchange partners.

At this stage I'd rather believe that the penalty is due to me madly linking to myself across my many domains, using anchor text that is too similar. This is my theory of the moment because everything else I've done made no difference at all.

I worry that in trying to cater to Google's insanity I'll lose my good Yahoo and Live rankings, but at this point we're all slaves to the monster, so I'll do it anyway.

My apologies, but seriously, why are you worried? The entire adult niche is a big bad neighborhood.

You seem to not grasp the fact that exchanging links is a violation of Google guidelines.

I'm not saying you should pull links. I have hundreds of trades on one of my domains. The point is if you're black hatting, know the risks involved.

This is one of the things I was trying to get at with my recent posts about networks.

We've always been, all of us, the "bad neighborhood". We've been the bad networks from the beginning. We exist for purely commercial purposes, despite the pretense of giving away free content. Everything we do violates google guidelines, from their perspective.

We're all bad networks. We're all outside of the "trustrank" circle, and so far I haven't been able to see or imagine any reasonable way to get links from the google elite network commonly referred to as "trustrank".

And that's really the interesting and important thing - how to adapt to these new conditions.

I'm glad that you're doing some tests on this.

I do tend to think we are in a situation where we'll need to be pretty creative and thoughtful to come up with a solution.

I've heard this a lot and I'm just not convinced that this is the case. I just don't think that Google penalizes a website because it's mainly commercial in nature. Even though they're sitting up their on their mountain, hugging trees and knocking back Starbucks by the gallon, they're in this to make a buck (or a couple billion) just like the rest of us.

Think about this. Joe surfer goes online and searches for "ink cartridges". What is he looking for. "The history of the ink cartridge" or "how to properly dispose of the ink cartridge". No. He wants to buy some ink cartridges. If all he gets is informational sites, he's packing has cyber bags and heading for Yahooville.

I do a lot of searches for recipes. If you think the adult spaces are ad driven, try searching for "chicken and dumplings" (mmmm, chicken and dumplings). Usually what you'll see is a three column table, with the recipe in the middle surrounded by ads for all kinds of culinary junk.

We may have a rep as a bad neighborhood but that's probably because you see a lot more blackhat in adult. Or maybe it's because of guys like Jerry Falwell, although he's now irrelevant as his maker has called him home where he'll spend eternity in a latex bustier and thigh-high boots watching Hit Me Baby One More Time over and over, just like he always secretly wanted.

Well, I should have added the disclaimer that _it has been my theory for a long time_ that google has long regarded all or almost all adult sites, especially our kind of adult sites, as being bad networks and a bad neighborhood.

As part of my general arguments about this, I would like to point out that adult INVENTED reciprocal linking, linking based on PR, making pages solely for commericial reselling purposes, and making and linking pages to game google - all the things that google has said it doesn't like.

But, my responses to your specific points would be:

*1 - no, I agree, not because it's commercial in nature.

But, adult sites agressively and continuously produce hundreds of thousands of pages intended to do very little but put advertising in front of viewers eyes. Especially the agressively SE spamming scripters, but the same is true also of ordinary adult marketers of all kinds.

We take commercialism to an excess, in googles eyes.

*2. Google would rather take the surfer straight to trustranked Hewlet Packard for ink cartridges, and not to every tom dick and harry reseller. As far as google can tell, we are all resellers.

*3. The impression I have, based on reading mainstream SEO information, is that recipe sites and all kinds of reseller sites are suffering just as much from the 950 as adult is, probably for the same reasons. They copied adult tactics. (I do agree there are tons of mainstream pages that are just as bad if not way worse than the crappiest adult pages - at least the pages not created by the scriptspammers.)

HOWEVER - recipe sites have at least a small chance of getting a link from the Trustrank network - and adult sites never will get such a link.

*4. I totally agree that a big part of the reason google has long considered adult a bad neighborhood is because of moral and religious objections to our content, including complaints from surfers about adult showing up for mainstream searches, and dirty tricks by shortsighted adult SE spammers, and possibly malware and the like.

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The whole reason I'm discussing this is because of the theory of bad networks, and I got the impression that you are part of what I'll call the "school of the new bad networks".

("new" bad networks, because as far as I can tell the theory only works if you assume that there has occurred some recent [as in the last 9 months or so] increase in google picking out specific networks and tagging or flagging them as bad[der], while choosing some adult networks not to flag as bad.)

I think the "950" is caused not by networks but by a new algo that now ads a score for:

1 - percentage of reciprocal links.
2 - uniformity of anchor text
3 - percentage of oneway incomings
plus
4 - positions of links vs content (the links at the bottom of the page -page content analysis)
5 - duplicated content (because we are all reselllers selling the same things with the same phrases)
6 - phraseing analysis

... and, for every one of these things, almost ALL adult sites will score badly, and the algo will suppress them.

(and they are all things I think we know a lot more about than we know about the possibility of google adding new flags for _some_ bad networks.)

---

As a final note, I do totally agree that testing for the possibility that the theory of new bad networks might be the cause is totally valid, and I'm very interested to see how your tests turn out.

So, it seems to me the next level of questions would be:

How do you test for the different theories?

and,

What types of site and structural designs might work better in this new age of google?

As for the first question, the problem with testing is that it's tough to get systematic co-operation with something that is kinda zero-sum. If you do fair testing, some or many folks will end up, at least for a while, in the failure group, as in, "This strategy for linking and structure failed to get google traffic.".

As for the second question, certainly one of the current ideas is the blog. But, it's got it's problems, the biggest one being you still end up with "the group".

I've been thinking that a link-bait strategy might work - but sooner or later, you've got to monetize the link bait, or harvest the traffic, which usually means linking to a bad network.

Well, considering I'm a linklist hoping for submissions, it's never a good idea to say "Hey, submit to me, I'm on the last page of google results." LOL That's why I didn't really want to be the prime example in this thread. I am grateful for your help and suggestions, of course, Halfdeck.

I had not considered exchanging links with other similar sites to be "black hat" but I guess you could read it that way.

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...=35769#quality

One of the reasons I've done link exchanges is to get more traffic to my site. Which is why I've been wondering about the issue of the "traffic link" versus the "full link" idea.

But dare I say that there are plenty of linklists out there who have also participated in link exchanges and they're doing fine. Penisbot's entire system is based on manipulating rank via links and they're still top of many searches.

The operative word there is "guidelines". Normal link exchanges as far as I can tell do not raise flags. People have been exchanging links way before the phrase "page rank" existed.

As far as the talk about bad neighborhoods, I like to look at it another way. Is your page really optimized for the target keyword(s)? And if it is, does the search engine algo recognize your target keywords to be relevant to the industry you are promoting or something else? ;)

I'll connect the dots one more time, then I'm done. Mainstream is at a similar standstill, but they're fighting over paid links - they've graduated from link trades long time ago.

In the end, you'll believe what's easiest for you to believe. But you know you'll never outrank Penisbot by copycatting their SEO tactics. It's a catch up race and you're a few years too late.

All I'm saying is you can beat the big boys with less work if you think creatively.

Since Big Daddy, Google is no longer passing full link value on every link it finds. Google evaluates trust on a per domain, directory, url, page-component level to decide how much value each link passes. Before Big Daddy, if a link pointed to a page, PageRank calculation was pretty straight forward - it depended on number of links on a page and the PageRank of the linking page. It's no longer that simple.

If Google doesn't trust you, Google devalues IBLs pointing at your domain. That doesn't necessarily mean a penalty or a ban. It means that when it used to take 10 links to rank 1st for a term, now it'll take 30 links to get the job done.

How do you gain trust? By linking out editorially and having people link to your site without you asking for them. When Google sees a pattern of links being planted on your sites and on other sites that point at your site, Google will trust you less.

The adult niche is in a bad neighborhood not because of topic. Matt Cutts himself admitted Google can't tell the difference between quality adult sites and spam. He asked Tony Comstock for suggestions because he thought Google needed to do a better job of separating the two. But he wasn't sure what signals of quality they could use to accomplish that goal:
Why are adult sites in a bad neighborhood? Spammy linking patterns that dictate how every adult site links to each other. That pulls every site down to the same playing field. Each link in the adult niche is worth pennies to the dollar. Why do you think LOR and Penisbot, two authority LLs that's been online for years, are only TBPR 5?

Massive link devaluation.

Why is LOR and penisbot still ranking high? Because they are not competing against mainstream sites. They're competing against other sites in the same neighborhood with the same, spammy link profiles. In that game, they win, because they have many more links than you do and your IBLs are no better quality-wise than theirs.

Penisbot also profits from the the rich get richer phenomenon. Sites that rank high in search results gain organic links much faster than unbranded sites that rank deep in the SERPs. I've experienced this. Just by ranking #1 for a search term, people link to me, and people who read those sites link to me, and so on, till I got a ton of links pointing to a page without running a single trade. And because of those links, my site remains #1. More importantly, those organic links make those domains more trustworthy.

DMOZ/Yahoo Directory links also prove that those domains are not spam.

More trust means more value per inbound link. Multiply that by a few hundred thousand and you get a huge boost from even a slight upward movement in the TrustRank of a domain. With complete trust, IBLs pass their full link value.

Finally, a site like Penisbot with high link velocity has an advantage over sites that gain links at a slower pace. A LL that accepts 100 free site submissions a day has higher link velocity than a LL that accepts 10 free sites a day. You can improve ranking just by increasing your site's link velocity.

--

I'm not telling you not to spam search engines. I'm not telling you black hat SEO is bad. I'm saying you can outrank the big boys without spending month after month collecting free site recips if you exploit Google's new algorithm instead of fighting against it.

Having access to several adult-oriented contextual link brokering services might be nice.

As far as I can tell, nothing like that is even on the horizon. Which is too bad.

Context links would be a labor-intensive content strategy, rather than an easier to create structure strategy.

What I infer from your comment is that you think link structure strategies (small linklists being an example) are pretty much doomed in the new google. Which is close to my conclusion too, altho I wonder about combination linklists, small linklists with more content pages - which could out-profit a conventional small linklist.

Personally, I've been thinking that adult in general will be forced to return to a pre-google traffic-trading environment.

Trustrank and "the rich get richer" have hard implications for the small adult webmaster.

I agree, and I think it would be in everyone's best interest to just close down their submits.

Me, oh I'll keep mine open in protest, but I'm with the rest of you in principle!

My long-term strategy is to maintain a healthy diet and rigorous excercise and outlive Kit and Greenie! |thumb