The SEO of Link Lists

[CaptainJSparrow]

Along the lines of what UW was alluding to when he started this thread, he mentioned the "bad neighborhood" factor and also said:

My suggestion would be to return to the days of expiring links.

I was reading up on SEO tonight and came across this article:

http://wpmu.org/improve-your-seo-by-...-links-plugin/

his article linked to this page from Google:

http://support.google.com/webmasters...n&answer=35769

where they say that they "we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action."

One of Google's bullet points is to "Check for broken links..."

Alot of free site builders have tons of old pages with broken links such as:

http://www.pynio.com/free_porn/matur.../st/index.html

that have links to dead sites, redirected pages, and parked pages.

All of those old pages such as the one above have to be hurting the hubs, such as pynio, in their SEO efforts.

UW's suggestion of returning to the days of expiring links would suggest that Webmasters kill those old pages that have no page rank and are more than likely considered "bad neighborhoods' by Google.

[blinki bill]

I am currently looking into ways of optimizing my link list and here are some things that I think should be implemented by link lists in order to score better rankings

Many people think that link lists are dead and you should move on, however I don't quite agree with this. What I always loved about LL is that the quality of traffic is much better than any other king of site. TGP/MGP sites and tube sites can attract more traffic, due to the popularity of tubes and traffic trading for TGP/MGP, but the quality of traffic they usually get is beyond garbage. LL always been good with attracting more quality traffic, nowadays they don't attract as much traffic but still is much more quality traffic than the alternatives.

In my opinion LL are still a great think they just need to be adjusted a little bit to match the nowadays state of the net.

Everyone is thinking content are the links, but spiders don't, for them content is text. There we some ideas mentioned above of how to add more text, however there is text already on your page - the description of the links. We all write short descriptions like:
- "Sexy Asian girl banged on the massage table spy voyeur footage"
if this is changed to:
- "Good small free porn site with two picture galleries of sexy asian girl getting banged on a massage table. This sexy asian chick goes to a massage parlor for a relaxing massage, but instead gets her shaved pussy banged by the masseur. The massage starts as a normal massage but this horny masseur is doing his best to turn this asian girl on and soon she ends up with huge cock in her slutty mouth"
you will have much more text on your page, you can also focus on which keywords you want to be repeated and even put some of them in strong/bold tags. Of course you can't expect the submitter to write those for you, even more it won't work as much if you don't write it yourself (so that the text is unique and targets the keywords you are after)

Another think is the links per page - 100 is just ridiculous, something like 30-50 links per page will be much better, you don't have to delete the old just have pagination with 30-50 per page. If you have those long descriptions mentioned above you may want to have 50 so that there is more text per page.

Keep the sponsor links to reasonable level (something I don't do myself), so that the total link count per page, including links to listed sites, sponsors/ads and friends all ads up to less than 80, the less the better.

Should we still keep the recip links? They don't do much good to you since you are returning the link. You can't have the same anchor everywhere cause you'll get banned for it and google is even fixing the "google bombing" where anchor text don't count as much for serps as they used to. Any thoughts on this? I kinda think more and more that we should drop it and list sites without asking for link back. another approach is what some were doing - asking for one link from the root domain and then list any free site submitted from this domain

follow/nofollow - in the old day it was very important to have this links as follow, now this is outdated and I think this links should be nofollow. You can't send juice if you don't have it and nofollow link from a site with loads of juice is better than follow link from site with next to none. If we don't send our juice to the free sites (specially if they don't link back) we will have better ranks and therefore the nofollow link will do better for the freesite. One of the main points for the link is to let search engines notice the website and this will happen regardless is it follow or nofollow.

Another major shift/change is the way freesites are built. Everyone keeps saying that free sites will never get listed in search engines and that they can't attract any traffic. That's true because free sites are build with the same mentality of galleries. There is nothing there that will make serps attracted to it. When you do a free site you should spend some time and add loads of text to it, specially the main page. The text/html ration should be pushed to around 40-50%, it may seems unrealistic but these pages don't have much html and a text article of 200-300 words will do. when you clone the site (well if recips re eliminated there is no reason for cloning) so that you can add your different recip tables you should go and change the title, description, alt and anchor tags in each copy, not to mention that you have to morph the text a bit (of course by hand not some generator) so that spiders don't think it's a duplicate.
I know this will take loads of time, you can't possibly be doing every day but you don't have to, the idea is quality vs quantity. If you spend time to make a good, seo optimized and text boosted free site you will benefit much more from it and therefore you won't need to build as much.

After submitting the free site - well there is no much submitters do you submit the site to your list of link lists and that it.
In mainstream sites what you will do to make you site/blog post seems popular on the web and therefore rank better is to submit articles, make lenses, hubpages and so on, all linking back to the site/blog post, then you will use social media to further blow the whistle about all those articles, lenses and hubpages. This is something we can't really or fully do when dealing with porn but still there are things you can do after submitting the site. If you have blogs you can write articles about each submitted site soon after the submission (in a week at most) then use social media to promote these articles.
I don't know if there are still any link dumps these days but if you get a list of working link dumps you can also dump the link to the free site and then every article linking to the free site to create further "link noise" which will keep spiders finding your free site on various locations and therefore think is popular.

Why should we trow the LL away when we can make some changes and keep 'em going, again the main reason - much better traffic than tube or TGP/MGP and much better convert ratios with sponsors.

here is the short version:
LL - lower the number of total links to less than 80, add some text content like a blog article displayed on every page or some porn site reviews, write long, very long descriptions yourself, nofollow the outgoing links, don't ask for link back and link to index pages with no recips.

submitters - spend time making quality sites with loads of text, don't just clone your pages, spend some time to change all title,decription and alt tags, and morph the text (without morphing soft). after submission write articles and posts linking to your site from inside the thext content, use social media to promote all those articles/posts. link dump all arcles/posts.

[JK]

Since the long forgotten "Florida" update, a lot of people were of the opinion that an over optimisation penalty/filter/degrading of rankings or whatever you want to call it was happening.

It looks like Google has enough information now, with Chrome up to a huge 25-36% market share, depending on what stats you look at, that's it's safe to assume they are using a lot more than on page, and off page data as a part of their key relevance x's, particularly for highly searched for or highly profitable key phrases.

We could think of the best way to build our pages, get the best possible links to them, but if people aren't sticking around, recommending your site to friends or at the very least bookmarking your site and coming back, all of which they do on the tubes with full videos that rank above a lot of shit right now, then I don't think it's going to help link lists much.

The only thing I can see any small "mom and pop" or single adult webmaster do in this climate is find a niche, and make it yours. This is nothing new, that has pretty much been the advice I received from day 1 in this biz, but because I had success with my shotgun strategy in the past, it's hard to change what has worked in the past.

There are a lot of things which have already been mentioned in this thread that I won't repeat, but everyone knows things need to change if link lists are ever to be prominent in search engines again.

I used to own a Gay link list, and if you're not too squirmish about seeing a few naked men without any women around, I would take a look at how GayDemon.com has changed over the years as a perfect example of how to evolve a link list. Bjorn has continued to be very successful in the search engines, probably because he has always provided a lot more content of his own than most regularl link lists.

SEO is a lot different now than it was 10, even 5 or 2 years ago. That's just my humble opinion.

[Toby]

Originally Posted by JK

SEO is a lot different now than it was 10, even 5 or 2 years ago.

QFT!