Google's 950 Penalty

[Halfdeck]

I don't want to be considered a "bad neighbourhood" LOL

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

The link exchanges I have going on there don't seem to constitute a bad neighbourhood

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.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

The entire adult niche is a big bad neighborhood.

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".

[Ms Naughty]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

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

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.

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

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.

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.

[Maj. Stress]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

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

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?

[Halfdeck]

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.

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

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:

Dear Tony,

I worked on Google’s SafeSearch filter years ago, so I know that distinguishing between the “good porn” sites compared to the “regular porn” sites is a hard
problem. I used to be able to reel off names like Jane’s Guide, Persian Kitty, The Hun, Greenguy, Luke Ford, etc. These days I haven’t worked on porn-related stuff in years, so I’m less familiar with the space compared to how I used to be.

In fact, I’d be curious to hear your take on what several the highest-quality porn-related sites would be these days. I’m familiar with stuff like fleshbot.com or nerve.com, but less so with sites like tiny nibbles or erosblog.com.

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.

[Halfdeck]

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

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

[Bill]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

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.

[Preacher]

Originally Posted by Bill

...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...

...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!

[Halfdeck]

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

One mainstream broker is automating it.

What I infer from your comment is that you think link structure strategies (small linklists being an example) are pretty much doomed

Small linklist owners will never win the catch up game by relying on old tactics, but they're far from doomed. In fact, newbies have an edge over older webmasters now because newbies are more open to change and thus quicker to adapt.

You see "studio.montserrat.edu/gd/old/lesbian-porn.html" ranking 5th for "lesbian porn", outranking LOR, smutgremlins, and hoes?

You think that url nailed 5th position for "lesbian porn" by collecting thousands of free site recips?