Bill - the tgps have a lot of outgoing links - with "different type" sites recips - what I mean is that the recips are with a different structure type site - the recips arent other linksites - wheras the LLs that have a lot of trades on their index page tend to be closely associated sites (very similar) - if we were to just link say the "new" free sites we list every day on the index page, we would probably get around the "ban"
I base that on the LLs that have made it into Y - they all seem to have very few - if any recips to other LLs on their index pages
The problem with all of this is that I know of at least one major LL that doesnt have a single recip'd LL trade on their index page and they arent making it in either
As far as manually applied filtering - I would say that for the sites that typically rank in the top 1-40 positions for very major adult keywords are looked at manually - best evidence I have is that if you look at the results for some of them and you will see a selected group always appear - some sort of Yahoo "safelist"?? The funny part about it though is that the list looks a lot like Yahoo looked right before they started using Google results a while back
added - I also know of a case where a major LL originally wasnt in the Yahoo listings but has recently started appearing - so maybe as they move into a more automated mode and trust their ranking algo things will change?