Google Issues Stern Warning to Affiliate Sites

[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...

[housekeeper]

Yeah, I'm not banned, just a little paranoid I 'spose. I was able to find the site on page 2 for a specific keyword, which I'm happy about and given the infancy of the site, I'll take it. Simply a matter of just working it and getting the content out there. So many of my other sites have been ravaged after the Hummingbird, I think there' s far more credence in working the social media circuit and finding different avenues to ge incoming traffic. Working with the porn star had instant impact, it's a rough tow as a short order cook, 4 sure.

Great cartoon!

[Cleo]

Wow, just finally had the time to read through this thread.

Originally Posted by Simon

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?

It had a bunch of resources that I didn't know about. Much of the stuff it talked about was stuff that I already knew, but clarified them for me.