the demise of smashingthumbs.com
 

Ok, I do have to weigh in on the recent google banning of the former PR8 heavywight www.smashingthumbs.com. I used to trade links with the webmaster of smashingthumbs. All and all, it was a good site – a work of adult webmaster SEO genius in my opinion.

Problem here is the guy got overly aggressive in his linking and use of borderline doorways pages. The guy was ranking for all kinds of terms on Google and I strongly suspect that the majority of spam complaints came from webmasters that we jealous of smashingthumbs success.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t matter if smashingthumbs was coming up for every term under the sun just as long as when Google hand screened it there was good content in the results. Unfortunately for ST there was not.

Even though he was a major competitor – it is sad to see it happen, I have a feeling that rival webmasters helped shovel the grave, and the main reason he went down is webmaster running it just got too damn greedy.

That my 2 cents.

Also on the recent banned list:
http://www.********.com

Damn... its sad to hear that :((
I was a big fan of smashing thumbs SEO work...He was on the top#5 in google in almost anything you typed.
Im scared to think what amounts of quality traffic ST had - but im even more scared to think how ST owner is feeling now :(

Live by the script generated page, die by the script generated page.

It should have happened long ago. That it took a hand ban tells you something about googles weaknesses.

I'm sure there are dozens who would like to take his place. And he'll be back, of course.

Fuck, I remember when smashing thumbs was just a nice little tgp, easy to get listed, okay traffic. Way before his pr8.

I used to trade a lot of traffic with him, but my mood tured really sour when he started to play with the SE doorway pages & ended up coming up above me for "greenguy"

From what I know thru the grapevine, we has doing some nasty stuff with Google & auto/script generated pages & they caught him, so tough shit.

I have no remorse for a guy creating doorway pages targeted at STEALING other sites SE traffic. Like Greenguy said, he targetted greenguy, tommys, richards, al4a and many many other sites in the SEs.

He's smart in working the SEs and getting great spots for a ton of terms but trying to steal other sites listings is wrong. Period.

From what I've read he was basically cheating so I have no pity for him.

He seemed and still seems to me like a guy who had a lot of good pages... I wasand still am certainly happy to exchange links with him.

Well it does kind of suck for him, but it's nice to be free of the competetion.

Cheaters never win and winners never cheat :)

Just goes to show that you don't fuck around with spammy scripts on good domains... and it shows that a lot of the rave about Google's semantic analysis is unjustified and vaporware. The text generation script used on a lot of ST's doorways was one of the most common ones that is on every free script site, and IMHO was not very good at all. Bummer for him though, all that money lost.

Here's proof why a well optimized bookmarkable site http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...xxx-links.com/ is always better that SE spam hell http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...hingthumbs.com if you want long term success.

he is as good or bad as every other cheater.
i dont feel sorry for him.

|peace|

re: st
 

In my opinion, what happened to st is part of the biz... and I'm sure it's a big loss on short term for st's owner...
BUT...
SE rules come and go ...
SEs theirself come and go...
But a guy that manage to show his pages in SE for term "greenguy" higher then GG will always know to play the SE game ...
I presume he will just get another/more domain(s) and will start to do exactly the same thing ... only this time BETTER

+ even if he lost his google traffic he still have his bookmarkers.

Google's gone wild. With chokers sites now, I think I've seen more confirmed banning in adult in the last month than I've seen in the past 3 years.

My guess is that it was the selling pagerank thing.

For those not into tgp, choker ran a big interlinked network of TGPs and bought and sold traffic. Looks like most of not all were banned.

My TGP's just keep plugging along rising daily :)

greenguy, why do you trade with tgps?

I simply cant get it, why to trade your quality traffic for lover guality tgp traffic.
but thats just one my cent.

If you offer something the surfer wants you turn them into YOUR bookmarkers.

I know a couple of LL's trading with TGP's and vice versa :D

i dont think that surfers from tgps are glad to browse through several pages before they can get some free content, they want free porn right now-:> Thats why i think that its not a good idea to trade LL traffic for TGP traffic.
But thats just my theory :-)

Traffic is traffic to me - plus I don't allow people to blindly send me traffic - they have to be clicking on a text link that has "greenguy" or "link-o-rama" in it.

Trading TGP traffic with LL traffic on a 1:1 basis is a bad deal for the LL owner.

jays, but you trades with tgps by hardlinks too (?), i guess

???

http://www.jays-xxx-links.com/main.html
left columm in the middle
TOP PORN SITES

ohh the memories :)
I just noticed smashingthumbs was un-banned .. and I see PR4 ...
it doesn't really matter .. when I googled smashingthumbs the site was nowhere to be seen in the SERPs .. but at least I've found this thread.

For those who are interested in some numbers. If I remember it correctly the site was doing 150k-200k uniques from google daily making me over $80k monthly.
And for the record, those script-generated doorway pages received like 0.1% of total traffic. And I was about to remove them ... but someone in google pushed the button

Happy New Year everybody!