Link List SEO / Seppuku

[Useless]

For those wondering: Seppuku.

I'm on the brink of not only requesting clean link submissions at my newest list, but maybe even demanding them. But before I do so, I'd like to inquire with the SEO-minded whether this is too radical of a move. Perhaps linking out to so many other shit pages while not having all those links back will be certain death, or maybe the slow gain of organic links will save my ass. I don't know. But I'd really like to hear some opinions before I destroy yet another link list.

Any other comments, concerns, or theories are certainly welcome.

[oldbrad]

I think it's worth a shot. I'm definately no seo guru, but it seems like if nothing else it might increase the trust google has in your site without "artificial" links or recips. At first it may suffer, but compare it with all the competition that uses recips and maybe it would get a boost.

Not to mention the sites will be alot cleaner for the surfers, which they might enjoy and visit more often.

Maybe even have a side not that says although not required, it would be nice to get a link from a seperate domain from the freesites your listing, or at least a main hub.

Like with my blog, one link to your site versus the dozens and dozens of links to my sites from yours definitely makes it worth it anyway imo.

Not sure if it means anything, but i do dearch terms all the time and haven't come up with any returns for the hun. He doesn't use recips necessarily and has been around forever and is trusted. Maybe thats a sign that recip free may not be best?

I could see possible benefits and drawbacks either way.

Brad

[oldbrad]

I also prefer immolation

[Halfdeck]

Sounds interesting Useless.

What's your marketing strategy to compel webmasters/surfers to link to you?

[Useless]

Please note - at the time of this post, my host's upstream provider is experiencing difficulties, so if my links are slow or unresponsive, it's not my site's/server's issue.

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

What's your marketing strategy to compel webmasters/surfers to link to you?

Good looks and charm.

As far as webmasters go, I would hope that some of the people who submit to me would find it in their greedy hearts to link to me from some other site of theirs, not necessarily the domain which their free sites are hosted on, but perhaps that blog they haven't updated [since they realized that blogging isn't a get rich quick scheme], or a hub. I suppose what would be most important is the way in which they'd link back, rather than from where. Google knows who owns what, so the where probably wouldn't matter.

With surfers, it may be easier to get them to link to me since they aren't in it for the money. They don't see every unreciprocated link as money lost, the way these fools do. Surfers link to things they like, don't like, or think their readers might be interested in.

As of right now, you may not think that my newest pervy creation is any different from any other link list and therefore don't see why a surfer would find it any more interesting than any other link site. But it's not done yet. It is not the site I envisioned, but that's coming. I've been working on a major change with the script which promises to make it much more sticky, as well as other modifications. The site has been evolving during these last few weeks. A few of my submitters have noticed that the link descriptions have not only grown, but are often over the top. Not necessarily descriptive, but very readable.
Oiled Up Babe
Dick Jerking Cuties
Bust Her Butt Hole
Hairy Redhead Hippie Chick

I've also modified my review interface so that I can easily link out to the other places within my descriptions.
link to Urban Dictionary - Alone and Horny
link to a submitter's hub - Hairy Hispanic Pussy
link to submitter's site - Jenna Sucking Shaft
Wikepedia and the UD -Small Tits Lesbians

Of course, I launched the the site with tagging built into the review script. The other modifications that I'm working on are also very much along the same lines, as I attempt to bring the outdated idea of a link list up to Web 1.01.
I believe these changes, as well as the others I'm currently working on, will make this site a bit more bookmark-able.

I hadn't thought of going recip-less from the start. That's a very recent change of heart as I've been weighing the potentially limited value of a standard recip link against gaining more submitters and hence, more links for me to inaccurately describe while creating tons of text.

[LowryBigwood]

Nice looking site Useless. I think you probably already know my opinion on your idea of a recipless LL. Don't do it!

LOL, but seriously... the site looks excellent and the color scheme is easy on the eyes. The site may well be/become bookmarkable, but without the recips you still end up with less traffic / links initially. And then you have to question how your submits will be. Will you have a steady supply of submitters that will create regular freesites, then make copies without recips just to submit to you? Is your traffic going to make it worth it for them to do a little extra work?

Don't think i'm trying to be negative, i'm not. But, I was curious about that aspect of the list. Any way you go, best of luck on your new site.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by LowryBigwood

...but without the recips you still end up with less traffic / links initially.

There's almost no traffic now anyway. Nothing to lose. I wouldn't dream of doing this to something more established. I'm nuts, but not that nuts.

As far as submitters go - that's an unknown for me as well. I don't know how many people create clean copies of their sites. But for those who do, they certainly have nothing to lose by submitting them to a site that demands nothing in return.

[LowryBigwood]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

There's almost no traffic now anyway. Nothing to lose. I wouldn't dream of doing this to something more established. I'm nuts, but not that nuts.

As far as submitters go - that's an unknown for me as well. I don't know how many people create clean copies of their sites. But for those who do, they certainly have nothing to lose by submitting them to a site that demands nothing in return.

Good point. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. And you won't know until you try. Let me know when you're ready and I will get you a couple of decent 1 way links coming your way.

[Bill]

Let's see, if I were going to try to develop a next-gen linklist, what experiments would I try...

1. Build partnerships with a group of webmasters that create a new type of freesite - freesites that are more complex, more unique, funnier, and have more text. Freesites that are unique to my linklist.

1a. I repeat - freesites that are UNIQUE to my linklist.

2. Only accept freesites from trusted submitters. Their freesites would be automatically listed. Part of the deal with the trusted submitters is that they are trusted to provide a certain percentage of chaotic linking.

2a. possibly have two sets of cat pages - one "preferred" set for the good nextgen trusted subbers, one for the old out-of-touch, not worthy to be trusted regular recip subbers.

3. Chaotic linking, generally speaking, would mean "dude, gimme a reasonable amount of links, make up whatever anchor text you like, just don't use a fixed anchor text, link to any fucking page of mine you want, from any page of yours that you want. Link to me a month after you sub the site if you want.".

3a. Perhaps, to become a trusted subber for a nextgen ll, one starts out by giving, say, 10 oneways to the list.
3b. There might be some way to track the linking with a script, but it might not be necessary.

4. Break out of the category pages mold. A nextgen ll needs a large footprint of pages. Create lots of content pages and just cram them sloppily into the linklist structure.

4a. Integrate a blog into the ll.
4b. Get your partners to create content, and let them put some of their links into the content in exchange.
4c. Tons of photos built into the content, optimized for the image searches.

5. Avoid highly strutured linking patterns, like category trades, and the current way freesites are linked.

6. But, do use structured, and possibly scripted, traffic trading. Go back to the traffic trading models of 1999. Fuck google and the horse it rode in on, I'm trading fucking traffic and google can lick my hairy butt.

7. Sloppy, messy, wild, and chaotic should be your core structural models.

8. To the extent that you can, create linkbait. But, linkbait is effectively useless in the adult sector. So, fuck google and the whole linkbait fucking universe. Linkbait, however, still sells.

I got a ton of other experiments in mind, but you get the gist.

[Useless]

My goodness, Bill, that's a lot to digest.

1. Getting people to create sites which would be unique to my list would be the single most difficult suggestion to set into motion. If there was a large amount of established traffic, I could see people being motivated to that.

2. I like this, but a guy like me finds it difficult to find a bunch of trusted submitters. (I've been told that I tend to rub people the wrong way.) I do love my partner submitters at Whoring though.

2a. I like the idea of filtered cat pages. (I like lots of pages.) Being that PS accepts a wider array of links, Ponygirl had long ago suggested that I create separate category pages as a way of filtering the content for those who may only want to see free sites, or galleries, etc. I did code the script to do that - and those pages are there in the background, but I never placed navigation to them due to the lack of content. My point being, filtering between trusted submitters and normal submitters wouldn't be a problem.

3. Chaotic linking is definitely what I want. I think I would just assume trust those special submitters with placing links to me on their word as tracking could be a pain in the ass. If I decided it was necessary, I could add a place on the script where the submitter could add the URLs where my links are present into the database and the bot could periodically check to see that they were still present.

4. The tags are a break away from standard categories, but there are so, so many of them. It could be difficult creating a sensible navigation system to lead surfers through the site. I'll have to give this much more thought.

4a. Oddly enough, a very light blog was a recent addition to the admin, but I haven't included my first post to the main page yet because I'm not happy with my miniature blog script. I'd like the tag clouds to pull from both the links and my blog posts, but I haven't gotten that far yet with the coding. My introductory post, by the way, is entitled "I'll be your Huckleberry."

4b. I may be one of the only, if not the only, list owner who shows that kind of trust towards partner submitters. You may recall a long while ago that I added a little feature to Whoring that gives my submitters their own page on the site. It allows them to add links to their sites, their affiliate coded links to paysites, a small blog, as well as automatically listing their last #many accepted links. Examples: Mine and Amateur Kink It hadn't occured to me to allow a submitter to create content for the main pages of a site though. That's a very interesting idea, Bill, and it's not one I'd fear implementing.

5. There was a time that I considered linking to the free sites from within their description, rather than the title, but I wasn't sure how submitters would feel about it. I feared they may think I was trying to hide their links, even though the intention was to link to their sites via a keyword phrase within a block of text. Submitters can be angry people too.

6. My ass isn't THAT hairy.

7. Oh, I can do messy. It's sometimes painful, but I can be messy.

8. Linkbait - That's what I wanted to do with the blog. Just be me and hope that surfers, webmasters, who ever - decide to link to my general idiocy. But I've never bothered doing a blog of my own because it always felt like such a waste of time. But then it dawned on me , who the hell am I kidding? I've been wasting my time on this shit for years. Why stop now?

Thanks for the suggestions, Bill. I see if I can implement some of those while trying to wrangle up a few trusted people who are willing to create content for the site.

[Preacher]

1) We've talked about it before, but maybe suggesting people build non-freesite type pages, such as SEO pages instead of the generic 4 page scheme to link to would be seen as valuable to builders, especially with your rate of spidering given your tagging scheme.

4a) I love that quote, but hated the movie.

4b) You know Dragonlists allows you to set up partners to list automagically without review *cough* so I know there are at least some who trust their partners just as much.

Rotating in the content blocks from various submitters to pages of their choosing would be kinda cool, but IMO it'd have to be as obvious as a paysite ad for your surfers, otherwise they may think whatever that content block links to is suggested by or part of your site and when they click through they may lose some trust in your pages.

5) Rather than worrying about what submitters would think I'd be more worried about how user/surfer friendly that scheme would be. You know you could have your script automagically link words in descriptions that tie into a tag you have in place, rather than just list the tags below the description. I have no idea how that would help, but it'd be really keen!

6) That's not what I've heard.

7 & 8)... You talk to much. Shut up and get implementing!

[Useless]

Originally Posted by Preacher

7 & 8)... You talk to much. Shut up and get implementing!

I'd like to point out that no one is more amused by my failures [and my continued whining about them] than Preacher. He should probably be ignored.

[SheepGuy]

If you still believed in the PR fairy I'd gladly give you links from quite a few pages the google gods have blessed, and I can send you clean copies of free sites and AVS and TGP as well. The idea about filtering traffic between those surfers looking for galleries, FS, or AVS, though, wouldn't work well for me. The only thing worse than that would be if you named the AVS I was using, which a lot of LL's I don't submit to do. I hate preaching to the choir
I like your descriptions, I fucking love'em in fact, and you've got enough filth in there to keep any bot happy I would think.
I know shit about SE's, just seem to luck into some good keywords, but I think it's a worthy experiment, I'll help any way I can.

[tigermom]

Hey, clean submissions work just fine for me. Just let me know if you need any I'll also gladly reciprocate with good links from other sites I have. I think it's a good idea, the only problem with these complicated link exchanges is trust. I'm not sure how you can work with a trust system with a large number of people at once.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by oldbrad

I'm definately no seo guru, but it seems like if nothing else it might increase the trust google has in your site without "artificial" links or recips. At first it may suffer, but compare it with all the competition that uses recips and maybe it would get a boost.

The beauty of it is, I'd have no way of knowing if it was suffering or not. New lists take so long to build traffic, that it's difficult to point at any one thing and say that's why I'm not getting SE traffic or that's why I am getting SE trafic. One of my many fears is that if it does prove to be a dud, everyone will point, laugh and say what an idiot I was to even consider it.

Originally Posted by SheepGuy

The idea about filtering traffic between those surfers looking for galleries, FS, or AVS, though, wouldn't work well for me. The only thing worse than that would be if you named the AVS I was using, which a lot of LL's I don't submit to do.

My primary concern about filtering between the links types was basically the same as yours. I was thinking, who's going to screw with free sites or AVS sites if they can go straight to the galleries? Being that I don't do galleries, I'd be screwing myself and my free site building colleagues. I do tend to enjoy seeing everything mixed together.

Originally Posted by tigermom

I think it's a good idea, the only problem with these complicated link exchanges is trust. I'm not sure how you can work with a trust system with a large number of people at once.

I've never been much for link exchanges. I sort of like having my sites being as independent as possible, so when the day comes that I finally have the BIG breakdown and delete everything off of the server and spend my days in a padded cell, few people will be affected. Of course, not being a link swapper has probably been the biggest detriment to my business over the years. Google must think that I have very few friends. And simply trusting people to reciprocate from some unknown location would probably be a mistake. I think that group of trusted linkers/submitters/contributers would always remain small.

I'm also not sure how many people I'd feel comfortable with directly manipulating the content on main site pages, but I do like the idea of having niche specific blog posts from multiple authors running down the category pages. Normally, I wouldn't expect someone to create content for another's site, but if all the affiliate links were their own, and the author's tagline linked to her/his own site, then I'm thinking a few people would be willing to do it.

There's really a lot to think about here. I spent a lot of time last night just sitting here staring at the main page of the site trying to imagine how everything would work and look.

[oldbrad]

"One of my many fears is that if it does prove to be a dud, everyone will point, laugh and say what an idiot I was to even consider it"

On the other hand, if your right and the se's love your site and the links you do get add up you'll be the one laughing and we'll be quick to follow suit

Brad

[Halfdeck]

Some good ideas in this thread.

One thing I did notice is you got ~897 pages in Google's main index and most of them are supplemental. That basically means you got more pages than your PageRank can support (or that you need more trusted backlinks). Tag cloud is a good idea, but you might try temporarily robots disallowing them (say, for 14 days) and see if a few pages pop into the main index.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

Tag cloud is a good idea, but you might try temporarily robots disallowing them (say, for 14 days) and see if a few pages pop into the main index.

It is the oddest of coincidences that I just removed /pervetags from my robots.txt last night after looking at my scan stats in Google's webmaster tools. URLs restricted by robots.txt (2467) - and most them being tag pages. So I said, screw it, and allowed the hungry bot in.

I've been reading your blog, as well as those you link to, in order to get a better grip on Page Rank distribution and its relationship with the supplemental index. So I'm not completely oblivious of what you're saying - just damn close.

Here's my single issue: if I'm getting traffic from those supplemental pages, isn't that better than missing out on that keyword traffic completely? We can theorize that by blocking most of my superfluous pages (the tag and title pages) with robot.txt, that my Page Rank distribution would narrow down to my category pages and hopefully raise their value to Google and therefore [fingers crossed] gain me more traffic to those pages. But I've never had much success with Google on my other sites, which is why I've come to the point that I'm at now; creating a ton of pages with the hopes that a few of them will find some hits. Yes, I'm throwing shit at the wall and hoping that at least its odor will stick.

[Halfdeck]

I've been reading your blog

Oh so someone's reading my blog

isn't that better than missing out on that keyword traffic completely?

Sure. That's possible too; that's why I suggested a temporary test. Just having a couple extra pages in the main index probably won't mean a huge boost in traffic and if the keywords targeted by those pages are competitive, you may not rank high enough to see a noticeable difference. (Remember to write a unique set of robots disallows for Googlebot and MSNBot though, since MSNbot is much less demanding than Googlebot)

Still, I would at least think about disallowing "detail" pages like:

pervespace.com/xxx-links/executive-office-perks-490.html
pervespace.com/xxx-links/butt-fucking-movies-1699.html

As you get more backlinks, you can slowly remove the disallow and let the site expand while keeping 90% of the pages in the main index.

My personal experience is pages in the supplemental index really don't draw alot of traffic, first because if other pages in the main index are more relevant for a search term, they come up first. Second, Google doesn't index words/phrases in the supplemental and main index the same way (for the supplemental index, its more like a "compressed summary") so that a supplemental page may rank for fewer long tails than you want it to.

I had a site with 25K pages in the supplemental index and daily search traffic was just around 150/day. Yeah, its better than nothing, but that kind of traffic isn't enough to generate even 2 sales/month.

Here's an article on how John Scott saw an increase of 7k uniques/day after trimming down content (not a scientic test by any means, but something to think about).

creating a ton of pages with the hopes that a few of them will find some hits.

I hear ya, and its worth playing around with, but I think the best SEO is about creating a site you yourself will visit every day, with simple site navigation that doesn't make you click 10 x to get to where you wanna go.

Every single high-ranking site I can think of (Youtube, Wikipedia, del.icio.us) have a high number of daily visits. That's not just because Wikipedia ranks on the first page for everything under the sun; its because people are hooked on those sites and visit them on a daily basis. That kind of stickiness is the mother of organic links and high search engine rankings.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

Sure. That's possible too; that's why I suggested a temporary test. Just having a couple extra pages in the main index probably won't mean a huge boost in traffic and if the keywords targeted by those pages are competitive, you may not rank high enough to see a noticeable difference.

Ok, you convinced me. I'll give it a shot. I just edited my robots.txt to disallow both the detail and tag pages. I have been seeing a trickle of traffic off of a few of those detail pages, and hate to lose a single daily hit, but I did say I was willing to experiment. Hopefully this proves helpful. If not, it's a lesson learned and it's not as if there is a heavy amount of traffic at risk.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

Ok, you convinced me. I'll give it a shot. I just edited my robots.txt to disallow both the detail and tag pages.

Well...apparently you don't have to keep the door open very long before the hungry vermin find their way in. Ever since I put the disallow back in place for my tag pages, Googlebot and Yahoo! Slurp have been munching almost exclusively on my tag pages. That disallow was missing less than 24 hours. Go figure.

I can't promise traffic to my submitters , but I can guarantee that I will direct the bots in your general direction (from many, many pages) .

[Receptor]

UW, how many outgoing clicks do you allow per gallery? You didn't state that in your rules.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by Receptor

UW, how many outgoing clicks do you allow per gallery? You didn't state that in your rules.

I don't count links.

[Receptor]

Thats why I love you

[firerave]

I'm just trying to figure out how to get traffic. Any suggestions? I am getting a little but not much. Not enough to make a difference.