Probably a stupid question...
 

Does anyone know why it is that many of the really good LL's end up on the last page of Google for the popular search terms...like amateur sex, asian sex, teen porn, etc.? Does google penalize or have a bias against link lists?

Probably because Google likes the other sites that show up front even better. :D

Google says they don't like link farms - anything with over 100 links per page is considered a link farm, according to Google. |huh

You'd have to point to a specific list to get specific theories, I think.

And exactly where did Google say that?

I believe VirgoHippy is implying that from these statements listed here.

Preacher's got me right. :)

Quick search results on most "good words" will show that if this is a factor it is, of course, only one of many.

Maybe LLs tend to resemble directory portals like Yahoo, etc.

Yeah no surprise that's the page he meant.

But does it say "if the site map is larger than 100, we consider it a link farm."?

I don't think so.

BTW the orange is blinding :D

Okay, point taken.

I should have said:

"Google suggests pages should have less than 100 links per page, but there are plenty of pages which list 100++ and still get good ranking, so obviously there are other factors which carry more weight."

I suppose the description "link farm" has a more potent meaning than I previously thought... |sad|

My bad Virgohippy, I didn't mean to go apeshit on your post.

Anyway, I don't doubt number of link may well be a signal of quality, but it may also be a reflection of database / scalability limitations, assuming any exists (though that's a big maybe). Notice the 100 links advice is listed under Design (sitemap HTML, broken links, dynamic page parameters), not Quality (which include no-nos, like hidden text, doorway pages, cloaking).

There was a rumor about the use of sitemaps to spam google and that it could be bad to use them to get indexed becouse of that. Just a rumor but possible.

No worries, hehe. :)

I don't understand why you point out the difference... are you saying one is more important than the other?

Not necessarily, just that in general, many items listed under "design" is associated with user-friendly design (e.g. "create a useful, information-rich site", "think about the words users would type to find your pages", "Offer a site map to your users") and crawlability (e.g. "The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.", "be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages"), while items listed under "quality" falls under search engine (over)optimization (e.g. "Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings", "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank", "Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.")

In other words, a page with too many links may not be all that user-friendly (e.g. huge LL category page forcing a surfer to scroll down to find free site listings). Googlebot may also prefer to crawl pages with moderate number of links or limit the number of links it crawls depending on site trust (speculation).

I'm not saying a site with 2000 links per page isn't going to trigger some sort of a flag (I'll have to test that). But if Google assumed that any page over 100 links is more likely to be spam, that would result in many high-profile false positives, including cnn.com (~142 links), amazon.com (~203), and ebay.com (~143).

Rumors usually hold no water.

I used sitemaps in a site and it was not indexed for about 6 or 7 month, not a single page. Then someone told me that becouse of the spam, google deindexed sites using sitemaps, so I take off the sitemap and in a few weeks my site was indexed. May be a coincidence, who knows, google acts in strange ways.

Fresh content in the middle of a large page does seem a bit non-userfriendly. |loony|

Google seems to favor more of my pages with a smaller number of links, a higher non-linked text to linked text ratio, and a smaller file size.

I imagine with design elements a balance of all things is more important than the (non)presence of certain other tactics? |huh

I've not had a problem with using sitemaps. But I've only used them on sites that already had more than a few valuable back links, so they weren't entirely necessary. |huh

Though there are a few technical guidelines I go by to avoid indexing problems (e.g. meta description no less than ~55 chars, TABLE-less page structure with content above nav links, word count 200+ per page not including anchor text, etc.) , I think when you're talking about on-page "optimization", there's only one question worth asking: Is this the best page EVER on the web for keyword X?

Now just add 300 more pages of mildly entertaining technical mumbo jumbo and you've written the most enlightened SEO book ever! |thumb