Quote:
Originally Posted by spacemanspiff
(*1)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. ...
(*2)Think about this. Joe surfer goes online and searches for "ink cartridges". ... He wants to buy some ink cartridges.
(*3)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). ...
(*4)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, ...
|
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.
---
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.