Google Issues Stern Warning to Affiliate Sites
 

From AVN Business News: Google Issues Stern Warning to Affiliate Sites

Here's a couple pieces of the article that got my attention:

In a nutshell, from what I'm reading, if you have a tube site that's loaded with vids provided by an affiliate program, you're traffic from Google is gonna drop, if not go away altogether.

If that's the case, then the question becomes:
What will take the place of these tube sites in the rankings?

My Answer: I know I'm not alone around here when I say that I hope Google goes back to liking our Link Lists & Free Sites, because I think most of them do fall into the class of sites/pages that "provide significant added benefits that would make a user want to visit this site in search results instead of the original source of the content" due to the unique descriptions that are used in the reviews (for LL's) and marketing (for FS's).

I'll admit that I've yet to click on any of the external links in the article to areas in Google's Webmaster areas, but that's next on my list...right after my nap :)

So what are everyone's thoughts on this? Can anyone add any new info? Links to helpful sites/pages on this topic?

This article is over a week old, so this may not be new news to some of you, but seeing as I haven't seen any posts about it, I thought I'd start a discussion |shake|

Death to the tubes!

We can hope at least.

My thinking is that the first thing to go won't be the BIG tube sites. The first to fall will be the smaller tubes owned by affiliates who are using sponsor-hosted videos or videos scrapped from or embedded from those same big tubes. The big tubes host their own videos, and they don't use sponsor-provided file names, titles or descriptions.

What will take their place? Probably more links to category and individual video pages on the BIG tube sites. Not only are those the pages where real surfers are sharing links to, but the big tubes are aggressively buying links to specific cat and video player pages.

In my way of thinking, if any of us ever hope to reclaim good SE positions, it won't be due to other sites falling in the rankings. Those positions will just get grabbed up by the guys who are spending lots of cash on link building, media buys, social influences and every other way to wind up in those SE positions we all covet.

I can wish it was different, but the other hand will fill up first.

:-|

Tubes are not going anywhere, just like tgp's did not go anywhere. They may lose some traffic "IF" search results drop but they will still hold onto the vast majority of traffic because millions of daily visitors will remember their site.

Here lies the problem imo:
'Does this site provide significant added benefits that would make a user want to visit this site in search results instead of the original source of the content?'
Yes, because it's FREE

It always seems the same people who complain about no jobs visit sites with stolen content, illegal downloads, etc...

I keep saying what goes around comes around and I have been seeing other sites popping up in top positions where tubes use to be. The sites I have seen are like circle jerk tgp's but somewhat updated.

So, could LL's make a comeback? Sure, why not. But I think the freesite model needs to change from the 4 page to ??? and quality probably needs to come back versus mass production (something I am guilty of as well) where rules need to be tightened up and changed to go with a new freesite format. The hardest part is accepting change and making those changes when LL's don't finacially make enough to cover the increase in review time to insure quality listings.

I wish I could be more optimistic but I don't think it will have a great impact.

From Google's point of view, stolen material that appears on the bigger tubes is the original source since they wouldn't know the true, full length originals are behind pay walls. Sites that scrape or embed tube material may be punished but the biggest tubes and their SEO rankings will remain intact.

In cases where they received DMCA notices, Google said they were going to punish sites in their rankings but we all know nothing happened about that. Frankly, Google will do whatever will bring in the most ad revenue. Damn us all!

I saw this story last week and even witnessed some impact from some of my merchants.

There is pros and cons here to this story, but for some they make a solid living on legitimate stuff. I know there are also others out there that are distributing pirated content and they are also killing it for legit content producers...

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Yes Jason is right, the legitimate people could get killed from this much like link list owners were years ago when google gave all of the traffic to stealing pirated tube sutes. Let's face it, when ALL the tubes strated they used stolen content. Many run legit now but it wasn't always like that.

I see this as either nothing will happen or the small guys will get killed again. I doubt google will drop the big boys from their listings as the small tubes usually "scrape" their videos from xvideos, xhamster and the other ones. They could get bigger which is a scary thought.

Google is and always will be the biggest pirate site on the internet since they link to it ALL :(

I would think (and hope) that us freesite builders are making them appear as part of a larger network as opposed to a stand-alone 4 page site by linking to the main pages of each from a hub page on the index/main page of the domain, where the surfer would have already seen a warning page.

Duty Now For The Future
 

APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE FOR THE LONG POST TO THOSE WHO DON'T LIKE TO READ.

CLIFF NOTES: LAZY BASTARDS CAN JUST READ THE FIXES AND PS.

Yes, that kind of deep-linking into what *could* be a larger network would be valuable...except for a couple of potential problems. One that the submitter needs to solve, and the other that link lists could do something about.

1. That "larger network" mentioned must be more than a page with a lot of links to other index pages of free sites on that domain. Otherwise that kind of thin content prevents the hub from gaining much traction, even with incoming links from good quality link list pages. And having a large network of interlinked old-style one-page hubs like that will also work against you.

THE FIX: The old one-page hub concept needs to evolve into sites with much more depth of content that focuses on the category/niche of that hub. Redevelopment can turn those potential bad neighborhoods into nice destinations. But unless submitters grow their hubs into something besides a thin portal site, linking to them or deep-linking to their free sites' index pages just turns the link list into a directory of neighborhoods Big G suggests that you detour around. Which leads to the second problem...

2. The other problem is that most of the free site and link list world is still using the 20th century reciprocal links model. Not only is that dated, I believe it can now be considered dangerous. The damage you may have seen done by the Penguins, the Pandas and the recent Hummingbird are just the start. All the Big G has to do is tweak a bit of code and the current "you must link to me to be listed" model can be added to the other link schemes that they're now penalizing.

Here's the thing...if we're only thinking of the BIG tube sites as our enemies, and not looking at them with a microscope to find out what makes them so successful, we're ignoring a source of valuable information. We talk about how the "pirate" sites built their traffic by letting users submit whatever they wanted with no controls in place to verify ownership of the videos.

(Okay, yes, some also used other means to get lots of videos online quickly at first...but I hope we all know by now that was mostly only needed to achieve a certain critical mass, a point when there were enough users and enough content online for the organic growth process to become a serious factor when you add in big link and media buys, social likes, etc.).

Anyway, we can talk about all the other details of those terrible BIG tubes later, but right now my point is that there's something those tubes did *not* do when they were starting to grow from nothing to huge...and something they still don't today. They don't ask users/submitters to link back to their tube site when they submit a video. And if a content partner submits a video the BIG tube will give a couple of text links and sometimes a banner link back to the submitter. So the tube site may link to the submitter's site (in the case of content partners), but the submitter is never asked to link to the tube site.

Okay, we can assume that the guys who run those big tubes never heard of the reciprocal link model in use by TGPs, Link Lists, Directories and other similar listing sites. Or we can assume they did know and even thought about ways to use it themselves. Personally I'm going with the second assumption.

Then the question becomes, why didn't they want the millions of reciprocal links they could have by asking for links like TGPs, LLs and others do? Sure, we can say it's because the users didn't have a website where they were hosting the video and from where they could also link to the tube site. But that's too easy an answer isn't it? I mean, all they had to do was tell the submitter that a requirement is that they have to go post the tube site's URL of the video on a surfer board, forum, or somewhere else online.

So, the largest, most heavily trafficked porn sites ever in existence do not use reciprocal linking. And it would seem that they do that by choice. While we periodically just have discussions about whether there might be some other ways to do reciprocal links. Like maybe a link from the home page of the site instead? Or maybe this or maybe that.

And to add to the misery, many of us are still doing link trades. Some even do straight A-B trades. Not that A-B-C or A-B-C-D-whatever are much better. It's the patterns that the latest algorithms detect, not just the links themselves. So we wind up with a lot of sites linking to each other in several ways that are clearly against the webmaster guidelines of the very SE that we're trying to influence in a positive way, and then we commiserate with each other over the fact that the SERPs are being dominated in ways we don't think is fair.

THE FIX: Throw away the old reciprocal links model. Completely. Don't tweak it, eliminate it. Instead, ask your submitters nicely to help you get them more traffic and signups by linking to you however they want, from wherever they want, using any URL and anchor text they wish. Yes, in any way they can come up with...*except* from the domain they're submitting to you and *not* using the name of your site.

Actively ask surfers to do the same thing, although of course without those unnecessary restrictions. And in both cases, ask them to link often and deep. Add some "If You Like It, Link It" text and/or graphics to your pages. Make getting those kinds of links your priority and you'll not only wind up with more links, but also much more valuable ones and ones that you don't have to worry about being seen as part of a link scheme.

--

That's all from me for now, gotta get back to work, but I wanted to get some of those thoughts out so maybe we can start talking about them and, I hope, making some changes that will help everyone.

:)

P.S. One other thing the BIG tubes are doing that I don't see most anyone here doing...they collect email addresses of their surfers and then mail them newsletters. Why doesn't every Link List, pic post site, hub, etc have an email collector on each page? Do you folks know how much money you're leaving on the table? Did you never hear the phrase "The Money is in The List?"

This is certainly true in mainstream marketing.

I had a subscription to SEMRush and it was a real eye opener with respect to top search terms on websites. Not using the name of your site but rather your target SE terms is critical as you mention.

Nice post Simon!

Read it once and need to come back and read it again later.

I said it earlier, accepting change is hard.

I've used email in the adult market since 1999. While the landscape has changed over the years, meaning there are more things you need to known and do to achieve good results now, I can definitely tell you that there's plenty of money to be made with mailings IF you build your own list of double opt-in subscribers. Which is almost ridiculously easy to do.
Actually, I want to clarify what I meant just a little. The reason I said that submitters should be asked to link with any anchor text *except* the name of your site is that most LLs/TGPs and other submission sites have insisted on webmasters linking to them with their site name over the years. So now the majority of their incoming links may have their site name in the anchor text. If that's true, then action should be taken immediately to dilute that percentage down to where it should be.

For those who've been studying what the latest mathematical algorithms the Big G is using seem to be doing, certain things seem to be increasing in importance. Yes, many of the traditional ways to acquire links are being penalized. But it's how those links are being identified that's more interesting. Which is why I wanted to clarify that while it used to be important to rank for your site name, and then later to rank for your specific chosen keywords/phrases, on today's playing field it's incredibly important that your link profile looks as "natural" as possible (in the Big G's eyes I mean), and tracking and managing your link velocity correctly plays into it too.

I won't go into the deeper details right now, but in very general terms a Natural Link Profile will be split into four main segments. The site name anchors are only one of those segments, or no more than around 25% of your total inbound links. The other 75% should be a carefully managed mixture of naked URLs, junk/surfer anchors ("click here"), and a certain amount of phrases which are a variation of the site name used in combination with a word or phrase that's semantically related to its primary keywords/phrases (but are *not* the actual words/phrases).

Please notice, I did not say that any of the links should be the old-style keyword-rich anchor text. The value of those dropped with the first Penguin back in 2012, and there have been four Penguins that followed, right up to October of last year. The first couple looked mostly at your home page, but later ones looked deeper. If your sites use too much (in their eyes) exact-match anchor text, you probably suffered some loss in the SERPs.

Bottom line: If you want to rank better but you already have more than 25% of your inbound links using your site name or your primary keywords/phrases, you need to work on your link profile and make it as natural looking as you can. Keeping in mind that the Big G believes that, in their perfect world, links to your site are added because your site is valuable and popular. So they expect to see not only what they believe is a proper mix of anchors and URLs, but they also expect more links to be added more often as time moves forwards ("link velocity").

I want to mention here that managing incoming links is something that the BIG tubes do very well. They have buyers with strict guidelines adding new links all of the time. One of the reasons for their rapid and huge growth is that they understood what the multiple Panda and Penguin updates and the Social Signals update were doing and took advantage of the opportunity to gain even better SERPs and traffic by managing their link building (buying) like it was media buying.

Okay...the majority of board readers probably don't have a big budget for ad buys or link acquisition. Even if you have those things in your operating budget, it's almost certainly not an amount that begins to compare to what the major players are spending today.

So if we're not going to be able to outspend your way to the top, at least we can stop sabotaging ourselves by continuing to do the things that worked so very well in the past but are now doing the exact opposite. And that's why I said "Throw away the old reciprocal links model. Completely. Don't tweak it, eliminate it." Every time a LL/TGP or other submission site insists that a webmaster links back to them using the exact same supplied text from the very URL being submitted...somewhere a big tube owner profits just a little more. And the bigger your site is, and the more submissions you get each day, the more that owner profits.

I hope that clarifies what I meant.

:)


.

Simon any tips on adding email collecters to a site? I'd like to but have no idea what to do really.

@Simon

The linking structure...I find it funny how today part of a normal linking structure is what was once called blind linking. Shit, and if you did that you were called a no good piece of shit blind linking spamming son of a bitch that needs to be whipped...and that's just what UW said |lol|

I've started to mix up back links in my own stuff but there is a part of me that feels G will come out one day and say all those click here type of links or the keyword links are BS and the only links of importance are links that are exact domain match because if your site is important real people will link to you by your name, blah blah blah.

You never know what type of change is going to come from G. Especially when their ad revenue goes up every time they do these big updates.

In mainstream you'd just sign up with Aweber, Mail Chimp, Get Response, Constant Contact or a similar service. They'd give you the code to put on your site and away you go. Unfortunately, none of them are good for adult offers.

What I suggest is getting a copy of Dada Mail. There's a free version that has a limit of 3 mailing lists, and 1,000 subscribers per list. Once you go past that point you can upgrade without any lost data or need to re-enter anything. The pricing is extremely reasonable for the feature set. http://dadamailproject.com/

I've used it for many years so let me know if you have questions or need a hand with something.

The point not to be missed is that G has been telling us some things all along. Things about needing good content. About not running thin affiliate sites. But most important for this discussion, for the last several years they've shown us, pretty clearly, that they now have algorithms that will detect whether your link profile seems to be natural and if it's growing at a rate that appears organic to them.

You can choose not to believe it, but the G has figured out some things by spidering the entire Internet non-stop for years. Those blind links are part of what you must have in order for your link profile to be judged natural. Their montrously huge data set has shown them that most "real people" (not professional webmasters/site owners) will link from their home pages, profiles, or wherever, using things like "click here," "more," "visit this website," "check this out," "you gotta see this," and other terms that we (the PROFESSIONALS) dismiss as spammy blind links. Well, guess what, the Big G thinks a lot more of the opinons of those real people. So it actually values those links a lot more than most people realize.

BONUS: Here's one other thing that most people either don't know or have heard but still avoid doing because they can't quite bring themselve to believe it or do it.

Let me ask, how often do you think most people here ask someone to link to their site using the rel=NOFOLLOW attribute in the link? With the way that many people insist on getting a specific text and URL combination in the link, I'm guessing not many would want to negate that with an attribute in the link telling the search engines not to follow or give any weight to that link.

Well, for those who don't know or don't want to believe...you *need* to have at least 2% nofollow links just to look like the average site which isn't trying to manipulate search rankings. And actually, many sites that rank high for their keywords will have nofollow on 5%, 10%, or even 15% of their inbound links. Why? Because sites that are actually popular with real people will get linked to from places like forums, blog comments, Facebook, Twitter, and many other places which automatically add nofollow to the links.

Takeaway: Add enough nofollow links to get to at least that 2% number, and potentially use nofollow to help dilute your exact match keyword links by having it added to some of them too.

Okay, you must be tired of reading...'cause I'm tired of writing.

:)

I agree |thumb
I agree |thumb
I agree |thumb NO WAIT! |cry|

But, when what you think should work doesn't, sometimes it's best to do the complete opposite. I like this discussion |thumb

But hockey is on & distracting me |lol| so I will return, reread, and rereply (That's not a word?!)

I think the original article from Google was about thin affiliate content in general and tubes were just one example. It impacts free sites, galleries, sblogs in the same way. In general terms Google raised the bar for content to advertising ratio. In the old days we had to write 10 to 50 words of text for an outbound link. These days we need much more content to compensate for posting links.

Rather than:
Try:
That way you get "real" text as content, not just a page of links.

|couch| Or add my story extract feed, that will give you real text content. |devil|

So have I.

Simon's posts have been great and even thou I have (like most of you) read the G warnings he has talked about I have somewhat ignored them or changing hubs and sites has slowly been pushed down the to do list. Mostly because there has been flashes of the "they are getting liked again" that stops the changes.

Just want to add this to this thread.

Bought this ebook a few days ago. Been reading it on my Macbook and iPhone. So far it's a lot of stuff that I already knew but it also contains some good information that I didn't know. Well worth the $2.99 cost.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...eosgoodstuf-20

Precisely! Have you done your keyword research lately? You'll see what the top ranking adult sites are, and none of it has anything to do with substance. You'll find on pages 2 or sooner, the criminals and file sharing sites, the pirates and everyone else that generally not us.

Great thread! Not sure if it was this issue or my Google honeymoon period was up.

I just lost my ranking for my chaturbate white label. I was taking the xml feed and showing the top free chaturbate girls on the main page. http://www.bestfreecamgirls.com

Either way, Need to figure out how to get more text content on the page.

Giving it a try.

Me too! Thanks Cleo |thumb

There's definitely something to be said for testing the counter-intuitive choice(s). Often you'll find that the things you *believe* should work are not at all what does. Plus it's very good mental exercise to always try to identify the counter-intuitive choices. Otherwise you can wind up like the masses who run their lives based on beliefs and intuition. No matter how finely-honed someone's intuition may be, it's always good to test.

Very true. The Big G doesn't like thin sites in most cases, or too much non-content (ads) above the fold, or too many outbound links without a suitable amount of content. The reason I singled out tubes, in particular the BIG ones, is that they're in the SERPs in a big way. And we can learn some things from them if we don't mind learning from our (enemies/opponents/competitors/the_damn_pirates).

That's part of why Useless was building good traffic for awhile with his PervBox site. I was regularly submitting content to him with 500 word descriptions. The last sentence was usually unfinished, it ended with (more...) and had just the word more and elipsis deep-linked. That also helped me pick up a lot of those generic/junk blind links that you need to keep the Penguin happy.

Most of what you can do is just following "best practices" when building or remaking sites. Make pages that validate or at least have no critical errors. Build for the visitor and not specifically for search engines. Keep up on what's happening with changes to SE algorithms and tweak things as you go. This will kinda sorta lead to somewhere in the low medium success level.

You see, you're supposed to build sites with content that visitors want to see and for which they're willing to spend time on your site. But you also have to understand that this goal is in direct opposition to the concept of wanting to get them to your sponsor's tour as quickly as possible. Further, unless you're selling advertising on your site or BUILDING A LIST, then it may not be in your best interest to keep the visitor on your site too long.

The first step must be strategy. Only then can the tactics be evaluated. Decide why each of your sites exists. Do you have sites where you're trying to build longer time on site, longer time on page, and more pages per visitor? Have you considered that unless you're selling advertising on your site or BUILDING A LIST, you're spending a good part of every work day working against your own interests?

I'll grab a copy of that and take a look when I get some time. It looks decent and somewhat up to date from what I saw in the TOCs and sample chapter, and read on the author's site. At the least it doesn't seem filled with harmful info like so many other SEO books and guides that were written too long ago.

Just noticed you posted that you finished reading it. Anything seem really helpful?

Yep, this is sort of what I was talking about earlier. You can study the Big G's webmaster guidelines and try to follow them to the letter and you still will never get the kind of SERPs you think you deserve. Or you can study the sites who are getting top rankings and try to understand their strategies and tactics. In my 58+ years I've been fortunate to have learned a lot from criminals and pirates. You don't have to choose to be one to learn from them.

It's not easy to rank a white label site. So if that's a new one, and you had some good Google traffic for a while at first, it probably was what people call their honeymoon period. Did your site drop to a natural place in the SERPs or is it way down? A natural drop is okay, a big drop could mean your site will be spending time on probation in their sandbox.

And yes, content is definitely needed on that page/site if you ever want it to get any SE traffic. But you also want to think about how the Big G will view your incoming link profile. Unless I'm looking at the wrong site, having almost 60K incoming links from only 9 domains (on only 7 different IPs) isn't going to do you any good. Plus too many links with your exact match domain (EMD), which is no longer a good idea (in fact it's been a bad idea since at least September 2012 when Google rolled out (admitted to) its EMD update).

And now the obligatory... Hockey! Olympics! Snow! Ice! Go USA! |macho_guy_ice_dancing_smilie|

:)

That's too many characters for the board's "Text to Replace" field, and I'm WAY too lazy to look for a way to edit that, so you get this:

|hockey|

That is a very true and profound statement, I subscribe to that fully. That facts being that it's all business, and there are tactics across the board, you borrow from everybody. The majority of the most successful are corrupt, or shady, they have to be.

I'm wondering what the best practice is with respect to starting from scratch, I just opened a new site and I'm finding myself using the same structural techniques. What I'm getting from G's new updates is they're nipping in the bud the redundancy of the content, in other words the spider will detect the type of embed code for a video, or the ref codes etc. and that's the red flag. I can't think that the keywords and target tags need to be removed in favor of playing nice. So what would be a good outline with respect to approaching a new project, for a free site?

Ditto.

Not a big drop. I am still getting organic hits, But I was the first link returned on the google search for best free cam girls there for a while.

Gonna fix my links from my pimproll hosted tube sites.

Thanks Simon. |thumb

That's good news. It means you still have time to ensure it doesn't wind up in the Sandbox. Get content on the page. And if you have header links to that site in some Hosted Tubes, what you want to do is get the link out of the header and move it to the sidebar (change the theme if you don't have a sidebar, then add a links module to the layout). That way you'll have one good link from the root of the site instead of sitewide links that the header gives you.

• Corruption empowers, absolute corruption empowers absolutely.
• Ruthlessness isn't just its own reward but others will reward you for it too.
• Above a certain level the rules are very different, but some choose to begin playing by those different rules long before reaching that level. The choice is yours.

Those are a few of the very general things I've learned from some of the bad influences in my life. I mention them because they apply to the discussion about those who have the top SERPs for desirable keywords and everyone else who feels some of those top positions should belong to them.

I'd need considerably more details to give you a better answer. Free site is a pretty wide open description. Niche site I'm guessing? Micro-niched? Focused on solo performer or various performers? Structurally is it a TGP, blog, tube, wiki, pin site, or some combination, or something else entirely? I'll be glad to talk off-thread if you want more specific feedback.

But putting that aside for now, in general you want to try your best to forget what you know about being a webmaster/pornographer. What I mean is that you have to build your site's front end with the expectations of a surfer as your guidelines, and then do what you can to exceed those expectations. Exceeding expectations helps create the headspace you want in the mind of the visitor to your site. Plus it can get you social shares and increase time on site, which coincidentally are some of the signals you need to influence your rankings.

Forget what Big G thinks about redundancy of content. Think about how interested you, as a surfer, are in seeing the same thing on site after site. Take what Google thinks out of the equation...now how are you exceeding the surfers expectations by showing him what he's seeing everywhere else he goes? Are there tweaks you can make to supplied content? Can you present it in some different way? If you figure out some ways to make things appear different to the site visitors, you can begin to cancel out the redundancy issues with the positive signals mentioned above.

On the back end, you probably want to code using HTML5/CSS3 and a responsive design. Unless it's specifically an SEO site, don't actively do anything anywhere on that site to try to manipulate search results. Follow best practices so your code validates. Consider building for "mobile first" and do your desktop version afterwards. Responsive design is leaning that way. Traffic is too.

POINT: The most important thing I can tell you regarding your question of "...what would be a good outline with respect to approaching a new project?" is that you absolutely must have a very clear strategy regarding what the site is supposed to be and what it's supposed to do for you. What you build should be based on the tactics your site is designed to employ in order to advance the site's strategic plan.

It's a war out there. The enemy is smart, aggressive, ruthless and well-funded. If we're to have any chance at all, we need to have at least three of the four on our side too.

Otherwise we can just |pray| for a miracle.

:)

Right, I'm of the thinking you've described, with respect to the concept and approach firmly in place even before I register the domain. I've recently opened two new sites afresh, both using the wordpress platform. One is a solo t-girl fan / content presentation / blog, and I did that as a precursor to potentially opening a pay site further down the road. This particular queen asked about working with me and getting a site for herself, so this was my way of getting the ball rolling. It's fared very well out of the gate and largely because a/ she has visibility due to her existing shoots with leading companies, b/ she is smart enough to follow my leads with respect to promotion. When we started she had 5,000 twitter followers and quickly gained an additional 1,000 because of the site, I've told her the benchmark should be 10,000 by springtime. The traffic soared as soon as she started to promote the posts in her tweets, so the upshot is I'm up over hundred bucks or so in commissions and just getting started. The downside is it's not showing up anywhere on G, now I realize it takes some time, but I would like to think after a month page 4 might show some results.

My other newest site is a Mature (Cougar / Swinger / MILF) blog in a magazine style format with promotion towards scenes, sites, and specific performers. I'm new to promoting outside of Transsexual, so I'm going to put this category in a niche specific. It's only a couple weeks old, and not getting any traffic, reasons would be, haven't set up the social media accounts associated with it yet, and of course G ain't having it, and given it's infancy, I simply haven't put it out there yet.

I've always been mindful about keyword 'stuffing' and not doing it, but have always had success with alt="" tags and ranking for keyword primarily through outbound links and ping backs, etc. Now, my questions are towards set up like, a/ are custom permalinks ill advised? I'm actually using a combination of sponsor embeds and plugin short codes, and of course stock sponsor links, In most cases I always use short name links. I've also taken on more CCBill sponsors (I'm not so trusting of nats these days), so I'm not certain how G is viewing those, but guessing they dismissed that long ago.

So any thoughts with respect to any of that would be welcomed, as well as some of the approach others are taking.

Grazi

The revolution will not be televised

Changing the links now. I may add a personal top five list of girls with my own with some text describing the girls on the page. And add a blog to the site where I can describe a top show with a link to the girl's profile and room.

Thanks again, Simon.

I've been busy but I didn't forget you'd asked about a few things.

When you say it's not showing up anywhere on G, do you mean it's not showing up even when you search for the site by domain name, or if you do a search using site:domainname.com ...or do you mean that the site's not ranking on the keywords/phrases that you're targeting? Did the site ever appear in the SERPs and then disappear, or has it just never appeared at all?

Google's pretty good at finding sites and indexing them long before the owner is ready to go live with them. So when you say they're not having it, I have to ask whether that means it's impossible to find in the SERPs or just that it's buried in last place somewhere?

A lot of on-site SEO is a complete waste of time here in the 14th year of the 21st Century. But let's address some of your questions anyway...

• Custom permalinks - are you using WordPress' default "ugly" URLs which contain /?p=N where N is the post number? If so, then you can probably get a small benefit from using WP's mod_rewrite method to create "pretty permalinks" where the name of the post is included in the URL.

There's some planning to do when choosing how to structure your custom URLs. There are various built-in options you choose or you customize the structure (which is what I suggest). Rather than going into why you'd choose one URL structure over another, my guess is that you'll probably want to use either just the /%postname%/ or the /%category%/%postname%/ structure.

Telling you which structure to choose, or even whether something different is more appropriate, would require me knowing more about how you're planning to use categories and tags on your sites.

• Keyword stuffing - I hope there are lots of people still doing this. The more who do that, the better for the rest of us.

• ALT attribute of the IMG tag - Keep in mind that the text should be related to the image, and preferably a short description of the image. Ideally something that would help someone using a screen reader. Any other use will eventually hurt you.

TITLE attribute of the IMG tag - This is a global attribute which can be added to any element/tag. HTML specs say you can use this for "extra" information about that element. So for an image you can use this to describe it in terms that are "semantically similar" to your prime keywords/phrases, the words in your ALT text, and the words in your post's title.

• Stock Sponsor Links - All of your outbound links should point to an address on your own site (unless you have submitters or advertisers who require direct links). You can use PHP, htaccess, or various plugins to manage this, as you probably know since you mentioned using "short name" links.

• Outbound Links / Pingbacks / etc - Unless you're using these in a big way to rank for keywords, good luck to any of us on being able to rank for competitive keywords. Or being able to keep a good position once those competitors decide to spend a few extra dollars to push you off the page. Every time I see one of the BIG tube groups start a new round of link buying I know I can expect to get moved back at least a page on some SERPs.

I keep hoping to see some other people jump in with what they're seeing happen out there, what kind of things aren't working, maybe even some suggestions.

But I guess all the lazy, selfish, greedy bastards don't like long threads. |club|

(By the way, this does not apply to anyone already in or who gets in before this thread makes it to page 3.)

I was going to say something about how "the medium is the message" McLuhan showed us that it's the very interpellative processes of television itself which serves to negate even the possibility of any truly meaningful revolution, but then I figured with the attention span of the majority of people today, it's more likely they'll just catch the highlights on Vine anyway.

:)

Hey Simon, thanks for the input. I went 20 pages deep in G and did not find my mature site, the keywords for the title are quite popular and showed up in multitudes, but not the actual site. Perhaps G banned me, it's looking that way.

Yeah, I use the custom permalinks on all my sites, and I've always done well with images and images search. So my thinking is to continue to optimize in the way I've been doing, at least Bing treats us well.

@Housekeeper - I figured you were already on the basic white hat path anyway, so I was mostly just putting some things out there to see if anyone wanted to talk about them.

If this is a new project and you didn't do something overtly black hat, there's no reason they should have banned your site. Or even penalized it. But since you used the word "perhaps," let's look at how to remove some doubt in case anyone doesn't know.

• Can you find the site by searching for www.domain.com or for domain.com? If you can find it that way, it's not banned.

• Can you find the site by searching for site:www.domain.com or for site:domain.com? If you get a message saying "your search did not match any documents" then your site is mostly likely banned.

Is this a new registration? Sometimes new domains get indexed and ranked (the Honeymoon) but then drop out for a while.

Yes, it seems Bing still adds points for on-site optimization. Unfortunately, you can only lose points with Google for things you do incorrectly on-site. Anything good you do on-site is just what's expected if you don't want to get slapped. These days, if you want to rank well with the Big G it's the off-site stuff that makes the difference.

But you have to step carefully out there...

http://contentz.mail4.spopessentials.../roughyear.jpg

:)

Yeah, I'm not banned, just a little paranoid I 'spose. I was able to find the site on page 2 for a specific keyword, which I'm happy about and given the infancy of the site, I'll take it. Simply a matter of just working it and getting the content out there. So many of my other sites have been ravaged after the Hummingbird, I think there' s far more credence in working the social media circuit and finding different avenues to ge incoming traffic. Working with the porn star had instant impact, it's a rough tow as a short order cook, 4 sure.

Great cartoon!

http://contentz.mail4.spopessentials.../roughyear.jpg

Wow, just finally had the time to read through this thread.
It had a bunch of resources that I didn't know about. Much of the stuff it talked about was stuff that I already knew, but clarified them for me.

I asked this question under Search Engines. Are LLs considered link farms as per the Google definition of link schemes? When I initially saw the Google warning regarding affiliate links and their criteria to base this on as "thin" information, I wondered about LLs. Now, I am on their webmaster forum looking to see what if any penalty my site has and the first accusation out of the box is that I have a "major link farm".

Also, does anyone have a link or know the context of when Matt Cutts stated a few months back that Google will start focusing on porn sites? In my research I picked up on that bit of information from several webmaster forums and can't seem to find exactly when that statement was made.

Here is the tweet from Cutts:

https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/427921190162665472

Not sure if they hate link lists because they are link farms but, off the top of my head, and some of which Simon has mentioned earlier, Google depreciates link lists because:

- they have unnatural one to one linking. You've got that main page anchor from that same sites going back to the link lists time again and again.
- they have backlinks that have the same anchor text.
- they have short descriptions on the link lists that add no real value.

As Simon wrote [and I badly paraphrase], link lists, in order to restore some former glory, need to have linking that appears more natural. It would be more advantagous to ask the link requester (i.e. freesite, gallery maker) to link back to the link list from another site and use anchor text that they make up themselves. Also, link lists should encourage longer descriptons of what you'll find if you click on the link.

Finally, IMHO I think that Google sees link lists as directories or simple search engines. They are competitors of Google and Google will not let you win. Freeones is a site with great value but it's been recently slammed in the rankings. Why? Not because of it's value - it's a quality site - but because Google wants that traffic and advertising revenue.

Bingo :-/