Heavy Hit on Link sites
 

I have observed a heavy hit on directories and link lists over the past 2 months. Just look at Alexa rankings of Jane's guide, Penisbot and Linkorama and many similar sites. It must be devastating for some.
Obviously, big Goog looks at niche directories with some sort of envy. Anybody here to offer a bright spot?

They like sites with "content" and not link farms that only link out as opposed to offering content ON their site.

That's right. Over the past 5 years link sites have been bleeding out, slowly. What is happening now is an additional acceleration to the downside. It's hitting sites with 'some content' and not just those with very thin content.

It sucks. It was a fun time and era when running sites like these were very nicely profitable. Now the amount of work just doesn't seem to make sense for someone who didn't get in the days of link-o-rama, etc.

faxxaff: Man, just reading your blog and I must say I like your style of writing. |thumb

It wasn't me. lol
http://www.megamasters.com/is-it-legal-upskirt#more88

True story, faxx?

The solution is to offer some content. I have an traffic exchange driven TGP that still gets, on a good day, 20% of it's traffic from Google, and rarely less than 15%. Take a look at Women In Bondage

On the left you will see a column headed "BONDAGE STORIES", which gives a short extract of that story then a link to a page (on my site) with that story on it. The idea is that Google sees my site as a "blog" with loads of links on it, rather than just a list of links, and the quantity of Google traffic I get seems to show that it works.

For those of you thinking "but I can't write stories" or "I don't got the time to write stories", click on the link for the first story "Teenage Girls In Bondage". You will see that it starts with an advert for an AEBN movie that is mostly text, and after the story is another mostly text advert for Darkest Comics. These are both adverts for sponsors but they count as "text" when Google sees them (provided you don't link all the text). And if you don't have both the time and skill to write adverts for your sponsors, then you are in the wrong business!

And the "story" itself is an advert for a book I publish, so basically this is a page of adverts but it counts as "content" to Google!!!!!!!!

But people don't think of this. For example, in my affiliate program I supply FPAs that are almost all text and will count as content. When I have looked at affiliates sites I have only seen my banners, I have never seen these text based FPAs use by anyone but me, despite the fact that they would help SE listings as well as get sales!

Yep. Very embarrassing.

I think they are over because of Google. Cutts said they were going after "porn" next and Google's interpretation of a link farm is the definition of a link list. That curative link argument isn't going to work anymore as has been demonstrated throughout the year with various blog hubs - and those blogs aren't showing pussy. Maybe the older lists will be OK but I don't see a future for any new lists.

And I am not being Chicken Little here. When my site took a nosedive over some EMD nonsense, I spent over 50 days going over Google's best practices and just about anything written on search from August 2013 through May 1st. Again and again and again they said what goes on here is not what they want in the SERPS. They don't want lists. They don't want lists where the content and the advertising are mixed. That alone would doom most properties. Shoot I have been in this business for 15 years and have trouble separating out the "partner" links which is why there is zero sponsor advertising on my stuff. Google made it very clear that webmasters have to tag which links are coming from sponsors and which are not. This is more than a business model is no longer relevant. Because of the only game in town, Google, you could actually be penalized for having it, and I would hate to see everyone's hard work disappear overnight.