Google Issues Stern Warning to Affiliate Sites

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Greenguy

But, when what you think should work doesn't, sometimes it's best to do the complete opposite.

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.

Originally Posted by faxxaff

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.

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).

Originally Posted by ecchi

Rather than:

<a href="submitted-site-or-gallery.com">Naked BBW teenage lesbians sucking cock
and taking it anally in bondage.</a>

Try:

Naked BBW teenage lesbians sucking cock and taking it anally in bondage.
<a href="submitted-site-or-gallery.com">Click here to visit the site/gallery.</a>

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

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.

Originally Posted by JustRobert

... 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.

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?

Originally Posted by Cleo

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

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?

Originally Posted by housekeeper

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.

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.

Originally Posted by lezinterracial

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.

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|

[Greenguy]

Originally Posted by Simon

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:

[housekeeper]

Originally Posted by Simon

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.

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?

[lezinterracial]

Originally Posted by Simon

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).

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.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by lezinterracial

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.

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.

Originally Posted by housekeeper

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.

• 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.

Originally Posted by housekeeper

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?

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 for a miracle.

[housekeeper]

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

Originally Posted by Simon

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 for a miracle.

The revolution will not be televised

[lezinterracial]

Originally Posted by Simon

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.

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.

[Simon]

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

Originally Posted by housekeeper

... 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. ... When we started she had 5,000 twitter followers and quickly gained an additional 1,000 because of the site ... The traffic soared as soon as she started to promote the posts in her tweets... 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.

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?

Originally Posted by housekeeper

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.

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?

Originally Posted by housekeeper

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.

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.

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

Originally Posted by housekeeper

The revolution will not be televised

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.

[housekeeper]

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.

[Simon]

@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.

Perhaps G banned me, it's looking that way.

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.

So my thinking is to continue to optimize in the way I've been doing, at least Bing treats us well.

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...