The SEO of Link Lists

Useless · 2012-01-07, 11:45 AM

I think it would be in our best interest to have an open discussion about the SEO, or lack thereof, of link lists. Putting the "bad neighborhood" factor aside, since there's nothing that can be done about that, it would be beneficial to have a conversation about the other key components of SEO for any site.

Link lists have obvious inherent flaws: too many links out, 99.9% of links are reciprocal, majority of inbound links are from valueless free site index pages, horrible text to link ratio, and often there are far too many ad spots per page.

Let's attempt to address these issues.

Too Many Links Out
In the grand old days of link listing, links expired after a set period and would be deleted from the list. This created a situation in which free sites continued to link to the link list because very few submitters would dare to remove the old recips. So, the link list would have all of these non-reciprocal inbound links, from crap pages or not, for free. The more inbound links, the better because, as we know, Google places value on pages that other web sites link to. My suggestion would be to return to the days of expiring links.

Also, pagination would be an excellent move. Some lists have been limiting the amount of links per category page through the use of pagination for years and years. It works - and it should be done. I know, submitters hate it when their sites get pushed over to category-page-2, but in the end, it's best for both parties. There is no way of knowing how many links we should publish per page. People used to say 100, but all of this is speculation. To me, 100 is far to many, especially if you consider the bad text-to-link ratio.

The Majority of Inbound Links are from Valueless Pages
Free sites are most often buried in the ass of a submitter's domain, multiple directories deep. What can be done about this? Not much. Content placed closer to the domain's root naturally has more value. The deeper into sub-directories we travel, the less value.

Free sites themselves tend to be quickly thrown together with perhaps some quick SEO performed. Quality-minded submitters already do what they can SEO-wise, but many still toss their shit together for their daily round of submissions.

Also, the historic demand of list owners to be linked from the index.html of a free site was bad SEO. Free site submitters should have been told to name their pages with keyword phrases. A free site entitled "Wife Takes Two Black Cocks" should have the index named wife-two-black-cocks.html, or something similar.

So, what can be done. Well, not much can be done to increase the value of a free site. Allowing free site builders to name their pages appropriately would be a great start. Having them keep their free sites no more than two directories deep would be good too. Have those directories named well, but not spammy, would also be a good move.

Horrible Text-to-Link Ratio
The primary and (perhaps) best way to address this is for list owners to create content for their pages. In this industry, we think of content as photos and movies. In the rest of the world, content is text. More well-written text is what we need. Link list category pages may be served well by having one side of the page publish the listings, while the other side publishes text-rich blog posts. Or, if you can rotate a couple of niche blog posts on the top of the category page, that would be an improvement too.

Too Many Ad Spots
This is a sore point, and I'm just as guilty. As traffic decreases in volume and quality, we all begin stuffing in as many banners as we can in an effort to further monetize our pages. By doing this, we screw our attempts at SEO. There is no magic number, but we desperately need to limit the amount of ad placements, whether we 'nofollow' them or not. Of course, the more content you have, the more ads you can probably get away with. Google doesn't mind you making money, but you have to be smart about it. The best way to advertise and please the big G at the same time is promote within text; blog posts, site and product reviews, etc. Banners are easy and pretty, but there isn't any content there. It's a linked image to a sponsor's site. We need to be creative.

Social Media / Community
In mainstream marketing, the use of social media is GINORMOUS! Of course, most social media sites aren't very fond of us. Even if you do create a Twitter account or Facebook fan page for your site, it's difficult to get followers. Sure, they'd love to follow you, they WANT to 'like' you, but they don't want their friends, family, coworkers, and potential employers seeing that they have 'friend-ed' a porn site. Still, though, it's worth trying. You have to see if you can grab a chunk of that traffic. It might be a good idea to create a softened or mainstream-ish page to your site that your FB fan page can link to. That may garner more likes than your Barely Legal Daughter Bukkake page.

If you can install some type of community within your site, that would be great. A comment script or message board can do great things. For one, as the site owner, it gives you the opportunity to promote the living hell out of your stuff and it's a venue to post all of that dusty old content you have. Create a thread, post some photos, link to a sponsor or a page within your site. Either way, it works. I have a couple of pages from my forum that do pretty well at bringing in SE traffic. Plus, your members are a built-in mailing list.

This is an open discussion. Let's all have a conversation and offer ideas on what can be done to improve the earnings in this little corner of the industry. We don't belong in the ghetto.

LowryBigwood · 2012-01-09, 12:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

Also, pagination would be an excellent move. Some lists have been limiting the amount of links per category page through the use of pagination for years and years. It works - and it should be done. I know, submitters hate it when their sites get pushed over to category-page-2, but in the end, it's best for both parties. There is no way of knowing how many links we should publish per page. People used to say 100, but all of this is speculation. To me, 100 is far to many, especially if you consider the bad text-to-link ratio.

If I was going to guess, I would say more like 10 links per page as opposed to 100. Obviously, the more links on one page, the less each outbound link gets in relation to pagerank.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

Horrible Text-to-Link Ratio
The primary and (perhaps) best way to address this is for list owners to create content for their pages. In this industry, we think of content as photos and movies. In the rest of the world, content is text. More well-written text is what we need. Link list category pages may be served well by having one side of the page publish the listings, while the other side publishes text-rich blog posts. Or, if you can rotate a couple of niche blog posts on the top of the category page, that would be an improvement too.

I think this would be wise for lists owners to create more text content on all of their pages.

More text content means more chances of seo traffic. Period.

Me personally... I wonder if Linklists are outdated. They are a hassle to run and take up so much time that it leaves little in the way of time for promoting your site. Maybe there are other solutions available where you could branch out...

Toby · 2012-01-09, 01:12 PM

OK, gonna play a little Devil's Advocate for the sake of discussion.

Will addressing all of the above, which involves a fair amount of work on both a one time and ongoing basis, actually make a significant difference in the amount of SE traffic to the sites?

OR... Would that time be better spent cultivating other sources of traffic?

LowryBigwood · 2012-01-09, 02:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toby

OK, gonna play a little Devil's Advocate for the sake of discussion.

Will addressing all of the above, which involves a fair amount of work on both a one time and ongoing basis, actually make a significant difference in the amount of SE traffic to the sites?

OR... Would that time be better spent cultivating other sources of traffic?

IMHO, this would make a difference you would notice. Also, I think that seo traffic may be better quality than other sources of traffic you may create.

Toby · 2012-01-09, 02:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LowryBigwood

IMHO, this would make a difference you would notice. Also, I think that seo traffic may be better quality than other sources of traffic you may create.

Granted, SE traffic is probably the best quality traffic available IF you can get it.

But, lets say for relatively the same amount of effort you can get 5 times as much traffic that's only half as productive. You're still 2½ times ahead.

For example. Only about 10% of the traffic to my network is from keyword searches. I've had an increase in my income every year since I got back into the biz in 2003, with the exception of one break even year. 2011 was a personal record year.

I'm not saying ignore SEO completely, just assess it on the basis of income realized vs time and effort spent. Most of us are one or two man shops, so our own time is our most limited asset.

LowryBigwood · 2012-01-09, 03:08 PM

Very true Toby. Well said. I'm betting that some could do better one way and others would do better with another method. What I would wonder... Is the traffic really half as good as seo traffic? I myself would have a hard time believing that but I'm not saying it isn't true for you.

dunc · 2012-01-09, 08:45 PM

Interesting thread, and I'm following.

I think in the long term what UW is getting at with SEO will be beneficial.... maybe even to the point of creating a new hybrid Links List type thing.

100 links per page is fine according to Google... but this includes all links, sponsors and inbound links.

I agree with most of the things - but too many ad spots is one I am not sure about, some mainstream blogs have shit loads - even if they are small and they still rank highly.

I also know that page titles are very important... so if you paginate, then you must have a unique page title.

Lots of good information can extracted from this Google SEO Guideline pdf

Useless · 2012-01-09, 11:29 PM

The largest failing point of the link list model has always been its integral dependence on search engine traffic. Most TGPs and MGPs use traffic trading scripts, which, with hindsight being 20/20, is fair to say was a brilliant move right from the start.

Toby is most likely right, that putting one's efforts elsewhere would most probably reap greater and faster rewards. My ideas are intended to help the link lists that will always be link lists, in one form or another. Obviously, there is a stubbornness to us and we'd like to keep the dream alive.

Anyone with the tiniest inkling of SEO knowledge would look at a link list and be amazed that they still get SE traffic at all. We pretty much do everything Google warns us not to do. We are reciprocal link-farming keyword-stuffing fools - and sort of proud of it.

The pure beauty of it is, we no longer have to worry about the sky falling. It has already fallen. We're walking on it right now. Whatever changes we make, should help us in the long run.

fetishbank · 2012-01-10, 06:19 AM

I'm going to say something that may even seem stupid... the number of sites is growing exponentially. All sites are doing SEO optimization to be on top of the search results, but as a matter of fact, only a few can be listed in top. So, it is just not possible to be in the top of the results for many keyword. At most you can get a good ranking for a few of them.

I'm not saying that SEO optimization is a waste of time, but I think we have to measure the time spent and the economic results achieved. For what concern my site, I do the basic optimization and I try to avoid the most common mistakes, for the rest I follow the Google suggestion: "just think about doing a good site". It sounds correct. If you've got the best site in the world you'll be ranked 1. If you're just one out of 10,000 same level competitors, you'll divide your space with other 10,000 sites...

May I also remind you that most of the thing we think to know about SEO are often just ingenuous suppositions ? Google algorithms are much more smart than we can think...

My point is: something CAN be done and HAS to be done, but do not expect miracles from SEO.

Useless · 2012-01-10, 10:40 AM

You can assume that some of us know what we are talking about. Miracles aren't on the wish list.

Toby · 2012-01-10, 11:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fetishbank

...For what concern my site, I do the basic optimization and I try to avoid the most common mistakes, for the rest I follow the Google suggestion: "just think about doing a good site".

That's pretty much been my SEO philosophy from day one. Top priority is optimizing my sites for sales, SEO is a distant second.

As for trade scripts, I think that's an area that link lists are missing out on big time. You can utilize a trade script without skimming clicks to trades, just use your trade script to track incoming clicks from trade partners and use that info to dynamically generate a referrer toplist.

LowryBigwood · 2012-01-10, 11:14 AM

All this is good to think about. But, it seems as some of you are pretending like you'd go after "free porn" "porn" "xxx" and stuff like that for keywords. That would be really tough to rank for no doubt. However, there are plenty of keywords that could be gone after that could/would provide good quality traffic.

I just don't think you should neglect your seo, but I am well aware of the time constraints involved when you have to run a LL, TGP, or MGP. So, for some it's probably better not to worry much on seo, while others may do very well at it.

CaptainJSparrow · 2012-02-26, 07:49 PM

Another problem with the way that we used to do Link Lists, and the way that some folks still do them, is the penalty that we all got (I'm pretty sure that a bunch of sites still have it) for unnatural link schemes. An example, this page:

http://www.freeporncorner.com/amateu...brina-deep/uk/

That page links to 15 Link Lists, using a link to the category page and a link to the index page of each one.

A link from a page like that not only does not help your site, it will hurt it as far as Google is concerned. It is blatantly an attempt to artificially inflate link popularity which will get you penalized. Couple that with the fact that back in the day we had what, somewhere around 25 Link Lists getting over 100k per day from Google and another 75 or so that got less but decent Google traffic AND the free site builders were submitting to all of us?

You have a small number of Link Lists getting backlinks built up every day from a finite number of free sites (each one creating multiple new pages to submit most days of the week). It became a maze where Googlebot just bounced around all of those sites, from the low quality pages linking to the Link Lists and then back out again to all of the low quality pages. That is a direct path to one thing, an algorithmic Penalty.

Does anyone else here have a penalty on one of their old Link List url's (or maybe all of them) that expires every 60 days and then is reapplied within about 5 days? Go look at your Google Analytics and see if you have traffic spikes roughly every 60 days.

I recently compared the backlinks showed by Google's Webmaster Tools of two of the url's that I used to have as Link Lists. I was amazed to find that over 650 of the first 1000 links were shared by both sites. That's over 65%. What percentage of the backlinks to Greenie's Link O Rama do ya'll think your Link Lists share with him. GreenGuy, what percentage of your current group of Link Lists' backlinks are shared by them all.

There are sites that take submissions and require a link back that do well at Google. One example is FreeOnes.com. The difference is that they don't have a group of sites, like we had, that are all interlinked (hell we all used to link our category pages, my amateur to yours, yours back to mine) and receiving backlinks from the same sites to all of them.

Back to that page that I used as an example:

http://www.freeporncorner.com/amateu...brina-deep/uk/

a decent amount of the links on that page go to pages, and sites, that no longer exist. The owner of that site would be better off, IMHO, if they removed all of those old pages like that. Pages like this actually hurt the whole site that they are on because of the broken outgoing links and they will hurt the sites that they link to because of the unnatural link scheme penalty.

IMHO to do a Link List now-a-days, getting them to link back to you from each page that they submit would actually hurt your seo efforts. The links out should be no followed...I mean those pages aren't gonna place in the serps, ever, anyway. I think that a Link List could do well if it exchanged (A-B_C)links with sites other than the ones submitting to them.

You don't have to be a tube to place in the top 10 for highly sought after keywords...look at "Free Porn" PinkWorld.com consistently shows up in the top 10.

LeRoy · 2012-02-27, 09:28 AM

^^ Just do was captain did... start a link list and fuck your submitters by converting it to a tube.

Thanks Captain

Oh and thank you for dropping all those link trades we had too. Classy

CaptainJSparrow · 2012-02-27, 11:21 AM

Ummm LeRoy, we ran Link Lists for what, 7 years maybe more? Not exactly starting and then fucking your submitters. Over that 7 year period our links lists, combined, got over 200k per day from the Search Engines and a lot of that traffic flowed back to the submitters. I wouldn't exactly call that fucking someone over.

When Link Lists died we switched to Tube sites. We told everyone back then that we were gonna experiment with Tube Sites and told folks when we switched over.

I don't get the attitude that you have of once a LL always a LL. For SE traffic it is a bad model.

Greenguy · 2012-02-27, 11:28 AM

I don't know if this means anything or not, but here it goes...

In July of 2010 I opened Real Sexy Girlfriends. I did this site because, at the time, girlfriend sites were just starting to pop & I'm still a big fan of real amateur pics/vids. Also, I had a SHITLOAD of girlfriend free sites, so I could populate the categories with my own sites before it opened so that the pages would not look bare.

Now, please note that NONE of those girlfriend free sites that I had already built linked back to the new link list - and they still don't. (of course, new free sites that I build do link back to the index) To get links flowing into the site, I asked for a lot of trades - most of which did not reciprocate

But, my links to them remain on the pages because I'm lazy

I also made up some table/text "ads" that I slapped around my hubs. Some were niche specific (see http://www.liveamateurlesbians.com/) and some were general & linked to each category (see http://www.adultwebsex.com/) I linked to each category page from all of my other link lists.

I did as much as I could with my own traffic/sites - with the exception of all those free sites - that'd be WAY to much work & upload time to add a link to each of those.

In October 2011 I joined Linkspun. In 5 months, I've set up 300+ inbound trades, most (if not all) coming off other girlfriend sites or amateurs & niche specific pages. The trades go to the main page as well as the category pages. I have no proof, but I do feel that this has helped out a great deal.

So, a little over 1-1/2 years later where am I? I'd say it's doing good. It gets about 500 hits a day (50% referral traffic from inbound links & 40% search engine) I'm in the top 10 for many of the keywords that I targeted, the best being "sexy girlfriends"

My analytics look like complete SHIT when you think about what a site should be:
2.17 Pages/Visit
00:01:37 Avg. Time on Site
64.28% Bounce Rate

But, I am making sales off the ads/text on the category pages. I'm not gonna get rich off them, but YTD it's about 15 sales (4 with 1 program that's paying $45/signup in Feb

)

Also, there is NOTHING else on this domain - no free sites or galleries of blogs - nothing.

I did use some basic HTML5 tags on the pages, like:
<header>
<hgroup>
<details>
<summary>
<nav>
<section>
<figure>
<figcaption>
<footer>

My point in all this? It does still work....sorta

I won't bore you with the details of Sunshine Lesbians, but I've employed the same strategy & had less-than stellar results (I will say it's only been open 9 months, so maybe it'll have similar results 9 months from now)

Now, I know this way of marketing a link list may be looked at as difficult for some of you because I am a "BIG" guy

But in reality, you can do the exact same thing I did. I still list category pages on the bottom of LOR's category pages, so you can get links from the big link lists. You should all have hubs where you can push a new site. You REALLY should be on Linkspun as it's a fucking fantastic way to make trades outside of your normal circle.

Why don't I do more? Lately, I've been going back thru the existing link lists that I have & fixing them up a bit. But I do think that I will make another niche specific link list in the near future.

So there ya go! Proof that the old model mixed with a little new thinking does work - or at least could work

Greenguy · 2012-02-27, 11:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CaptainJSparrow

I don't get the attitude that you have of once a LL always a LL. For SE traffic it is a bad model.

I think he's talking about all the trades that disappeared. And, you may want to rethink the later a little bit after reading that book I posted

CaptainJSparrow · 2012-02-27, 01:03 PM

My comment "For SE traffic it's a bad model" was referring to the old way that LL's were done, with the Circle of LL's combined with the Circle of submitters. As I mentioned in my original post I think a LL could do well if it followed the guidelines for SEO in 2012.

Quote:

Too Many Links Out...People used to say 100, but all of this is speculation.

Matt Cutts actually addressed that here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5h...eature=related

Googlers still refer to Web Pages as "Articles"...that is the way that they think of a page. IMHO if a LL were done without the intent to give and receive Link Juice, then it could work quite well. Basically as a review site, written in your own words, linking to good content, it would be an Article that is keyword rich and ripe for the crawling by Googlebot.

CaptainJSparrow · 2012-02-29, 12:32 AM

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

Quote:

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 · 2012-03-25, 02:07 PM

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 · 2012-03-26, 06:11 AM

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 · 2012-03-26, 09:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JK

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

QFT!

CaptainJSparrow · 2012-03-29, 02:47 PM

I remember back before there were Link Lists we all had websites full of free pictures that just dominated the serps (at first Yahoo and a few others, then Google when they came about) and we sent the traffic to the pay sites, usually on a pre-paid basis. The pay sites did not have the technology to see if the traffic was converting, they could just look at raw clicks coming in from your website.

Then technology advanced, and Google took over the search part of the net and tracking software advanced where pay sites could track where the sales came from.

I am not sure who came up with the concept of a Link List originally. I do remember that LL's were popular when the technology was not there to easily display movies on the internet. I suspect that the LL concept was created as a way to easily get a lot of back links for the purpose of getting high placements in Google. This was back when Google only valued gross back links without having the ability to value them accordingly. Hence, a lot of back links (even from new pages) got you top placements on Google which got you the absolute best traffic on the internet.

Back then, the Link List owners did not want to create the content (which was picture galleries at the time) they just wanted to evaluate submissions and decide which galleries they would display. Of course, LL owners were all about aggressively exchanging links because they knew that the more links that they developed, the more search engine traffic their site got.

The folks that created the "free" sites just wanted to create the galleries and get the instant hit of search engine traffic from the various lists that they submitted to. They traded links too, especially on their hubs, and some of them developed Link Lists too. At some point, the ability to display very short movies was created and some folks started submitting movie clips galleries in addition to picture galleries.

TGP's were around back then but their traffic was mostly traded and not considered valuable. The Link Lists search engine traffic converted great though!

Then technology advanced again and tube sites were created. We all hated the first tube sites because they had stolen content and they took over the search engines. Well, now-a-days tube sites rule the search engines. They do not have to have stolen content because most of the good pay sites offer free videos for the tube sites to use to promote the pay sites.

The ability for any webmaster to easily create a tube site with the actual content that the surfer is wanting combined with the fact that Google has used penalties to get rid of the middleman, in this instance Link Lists, would suggest that trying to make Link Lists work again is comparable to trying to convince people to use 8 tracks instead of cd's or digital music options such as their phones, ipods, etc.

Link Lists were a middle man. They did well because the back links and all of the text on the pages got them to the top of Google. Technology has advanced. Google has a penalty in place for link schemes and I dare say that every Link List has that penalty and every site linking (from numerous pages) to, or getting links from, a Link List has that penalty.

I am not understanding why folks say that tube sites do not have good traffic and/or that they do not convert. As an example, one of my tubes sent 149,709 uniques to clients and made 106 sales (73 of which were mobile sales) over the last 6 days. Not horrible traffic or sales....matter of fact, not that far off what the old Link Lists used to do.

Everyone wants search engine traffic, specifically Google.

Now-a-days Google has the technology in place to see what a surfer does when he or she3 comes to your website. The engines can tell how many pages were viewed, how long the surfer stayed on your site, and whether he or she was satisfied that their search delivered what they were looking for.

Google also places value on back links. Google looks at what sites your site links with. They are great at finding link schemes and penalizing them. Hence, I just can not envision a way that Link Lists can get past all of this and get decent traffic from the search engines to send to the submitters sites.

JK · 2012-03-29, 11:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CaptainJSparrow

I remember back before there were Link Lists we all had websites full of free pictures that just dominated the serps (at first Yahoo and a few others, then Google when they came about) and we sent the traffic to the pay sites, usually on a pre-paid basis. The pay sites did not have the technology to see if the traffic was converting, they could just look at raw clicks coming in from your website.

There's a few things I wanted to say about this because I don't think your memory is entirely correct, but I could very well be wrong, my memory certainly isn't that great. I was around early on too when Yahoo, AltaVista, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler and HotBot; which was like a search engine aggregator, were all pretty popular.

There may have been some sponsors who worked on a pre-paid basis, but CyberErotica and MaxCash were the first that I remember doing PPS. Before them, there was XPics who paid per click, I'm almost positive they had the ability to track sales made by affiliates, they were, from memory, using some pretty advanced technology for the day, but they'd rather pay per click and just shave them. There were others, like babylon-x who just paid per click and probably didn't care about affilite conversions since they were making so much money and a casino affiliate program that burnt everyone that I can't remember the name of.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CaptainJSparrow

Then technology advanced, and Google took over the search part of the net and tracking software advanced where pay sites could track where the sales came from.

I am not sure who came up with the concept of a Link List originally. I do remember that LL's were popular when the technology was not there to easily display movies on the internet. I suspect that the LL concept was created as a way to easily get a lot of back links for the purpose of getting high placements in Google. This was back when Google only valued gross back links without having the ability to value them accordingly. Hence, a lot of back links (even from new pages) got you top placements on Google which got you the absolute best traffic on the internet.

Google, or Backrub, has always valued quality links over the quantity of them. This is essentially what PageRank is/does. That is also what separated Google from the other search engines who were primarily using on-page factors such as keyword density, meta keywords and other easily gameable factors. Thus Google's results were better, webmasters started telling people this, Google somehow managed to sell their results to Yahoo so they could focus on other things apart from search, presumably because they didn't have the foresight to see that search was going to be as big is it now is, and that was the tipping point when Google began to snowball into what it is today.

One example: Early in Google's life, if you managed to get 1 PR6 link to your site, you could easily get your site a PR5 after the next PR update, which occured roughly once each month. After the PR update, Google would "dance", as it only used to update sporadically, not kind of organically and dynamically as it does now. Google used to place so much emphasis on PR, your rankings would directly correlate with your PR, and the anchor text of those links. You could pretty much rank a brand new site in 1 month or less for any phrase you wanted if you had the right anchor text, a little bit of on-page SEO, and a higher PR than the sites below you.

All that changed a very long time ago, a lot longer ago than many people, especially those new to the web can even comprehend, which is why I think some people don't understand the importance (or complete lack thereof) of the PR that shows up on the toolbar.

For some reason I felt like pointing that out, feel free to correct me if I've remembered things wrong. I think Greenie knows a few of the first link lists, what with Link-o-Rama being one of them and all

CaptainJSparrow · 2012-03-31, 02:14 PM

I can't really speak for anyone other than myself and the free site owners that I knew back in the days, from about 1996 to 1999, we used to get paid ahead of time by the big sponsors. Of course, some tried to shave, but we always came to an agreement. For my sites, we had our own counters of outgoing traffic and the clients usually went with our numbers. We started out making about two cents per click and when it got competitive we were getting fourteen cents'ish. At that time, none of the sponsors that I worked with had the programs to specifically determine whether the traffic made them money or not. That said, they would do tests and when we would send traffic their sales went up significantly...most of the time.

Google did always value higher pr links, but massive quantities of links (even low quality ones) could get a site higher in the serps.

With Link Lists, the whole point of requiring the submitters to submit their pages to other Link Lists (most LL's required a table with other popular LL's in the table) was to have those pages get page rank, and traffic, from the other Link Lists in the hopes that those pages would increase your Link List's page rank and placement in the serps. Some folks would try to create a page specifically for your LL to see what type of traffic they were getting from you...the LL owners frowned upon this and would even black list those folks.

The moral of the story though, IMHO, is that model of the Link List was created as a form of link bait to get back links for the purpose of getting your LL ranked higher in the serps. Everything was aimed at that, even the modifications that came about from the LL owners such as requiring the submitter to submit to other lists (otherwise they would only be getting your pr and you wanted them to get pr from the other lists and send it to you), having tertiary pages for each of your categories (to avoid direct page to page reciprocal linking), etc.

Unfortunately, what it turned into over time was a group of Link Lists that linked to thousands of pages on a domain (actually often on multiple domains owned by the same person), those thousands of pages linking back to the Link List on each of the pages with a redundant table that had a link to both the index page and the category page, the majority of the Link Lists interlinking all of their category and index pages with the other Link Lists, and invariably those Link Lists interlinking with any other good sites that folks could find and then everyone else would see the link and get one too.

Hence, a big cluster fuck of interlinked pages that exists to this day that Google has penalized the hell out of. Think of what is out there, just from the examples that I posted earlier in this thread. Thousands of old pages from years ago, that have a grey bar for page rank...this means that Google does not value these pages at all. They are considered a bad neighborhood.

Hence, if you are a webmaster that submitted to the Link Lists and you have hundreds or thousands of these grey barred pages on your domain, then you will never get significant Google traffic to that domain, as long as you keep those pages up, because those old bad pages make Google consider your domain a bad neighborhood.

If you own a Link List and you still have links to those old pages somewhere on your domain then you are linking to a bad neighborhood and have a penalty. Also, if your Link List has too many links from those old pages, you have a penalty for that.

Google caught on to this scheme to artificially inflate your sites position in the serps years ago and there is just no way for these sites (the hub domains of the submitters and the Link Lists) to get out of that penalty until a decent percentage of those pages are deleted off the servers and the Link Lists delete their old pages that have the links to those bad pages.

2012-01-07, 11:45 AM	#1
Useless Certified Nice Person Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Dirty Undies, NY Posts: 11,268	The SEO of Link Lists I think it would be in our best interest to have an open discussion about the SEO, or lack thereof, of link lists. Putting the "bad neighborhood" factor aside, since there's nothing that can be done about that, it would be beneficial to have a conversation about the other key components of SEO for any site. Link lists have obvious inherent flaws: too many links out, 99.9% of links are reciprocal, majority of inbound links are from valueless free site index pages, horrible text to link ratio, and often there are far too many ad spots per page. Let's attempt to address these issues. Too Many Links Out In the grand old days of link listing, links expired after a set period and would be deleted from the list. This created a situation in which free sites continued to link to the link list because very few submitters would dare to remove the old recips. So, the link list would have all of these non-reciprocal inbound links, from crap pages or not, for free. The more inbound links, the better because, as we know, Google places value on pages that other web sites link to. My suggestion would be to return to the days of expiring links. Also, pagination would be an excellent move. Some lists have been limiting the amount of links per category page through the use of pagination for years and years. It works - and it should be done. I know, submitters hate it when their sites get pushed over to category-page-2, but in the end, it's best for both parties. There is no way of knowing how many links we should publish per page. People used to say 100, but all of this is speculation. To me, 100 is far to many, especially if you consider the bad text-to-link ratio. The Majority of Inbound Links are from Valueless Pages Free sites are most often buried in the ass of a submitter's domain, multiple directories deep. What can be done about this? Not much. Content placed closer to the domain's root naturally has more value. The deeper into sub-directories we travel, the less value. Free sites themselves tend to be quickly thrown together with perhaps some quick SEO performed. Quality-minded submitters already do what they can SEO-wise, but many still toss their shit together for their daily round of submissions. Also, the historic demand of list owners to be linked from the index.html of a free site was bad SEO. Free site submitters should have been told to name their pages with keyword phrases. A free site entitled "Wife Takes Two Black Cocks" should have the index named wife-two-black-cocks.html, or something similar. So, what can be done. Well, not much can be done to increase the value of a free site. Allowing free site builders to name their pages appropriately would be a great start. Having them keep their free sites no more than two directories deep would be good too. Have those directories named well, but not spammy, would also be a good move. Horrible Text-to-Link Ratio The primary and (perhaps) best way to address this is for list owners to create content for their pages. In this industry, we think of content as photos and movies. In the rest of the world, content is text. More well-written text is what we need. Link list category pages may be served well by having one side of the page publish the listings, while the other side publishes text-rich blog posts. Or, if you can rotate a couple of niche blog posts on the top of the category page, that would be an improvement too. Too Many Ad Spots This is a sore point, and I'm just as guilty. As traffic decreases in volume and quality, we all begin stuffing in as many banners as we can in an effort to further monetize our pages. By doing this, we screw our attempts at SEO. There is no magic number, but we desperately need to limit the amount of ad placements, whether we 'nofollow' them or not. Of course, the more content you have, the more ads you can probably get away with. Google doesn't mind you making money, but you have to be smart about it. The best way to advertise and please the big G at the same time is promote within text; blog posts, site and product reviews, etc. Banners are easy and pretty, but there isn't any content there. It's a linked image to a sponsor's site. We need to be creative. Social Media / Community In mainstream marketing, the use of social media is GINORMOUS! Of course, most social media sites aren't very fond of us. Even if you do create a Twitter account or Facebook fan page for your site, it's difficult to get followers. Sure, they'd love to follow you, they WANT to 'like' you, but they don't want their friends, family, coworkers, and potential employers seeing that they have 'friend-ed' a porn site. Still, though, it's worth trying. You have to see if you can grab a chunk of that traffic. It might be a good idea to create a softened or mainstream-ish page to your site that your FB fan page can link to. That may garner more likes than your Barely Legal Daughter Bukkake page. If you can install some type of community within your site, that would be great. A comment script or message board can do great things. For one, as the site owner, it gives you the opportunity to promote the living hell out of your stuff and it's a venue to post all of that dusty old content you have. Create a thread, post some photos, link to a sponsor or a page within your site. Either way, it works. I have a couple of pages from my forum that do pretty well at bringing in SE traffic. Plus, your members are a built-in mailing list. This is an open discussion. Let's all have a conversation and offer ideas on what can be done to improve the earnings in this little corner of the industry. We don't belong in the ghetto. __________________ Click here to purchase a bridge I'm selling. Last edited by Useless; 2012-01-07 at 12:07 PM..

2012-01-09, 01:12 PM	#3
Toby Lonewolf Internet Sales Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Houston Posts: 4,826	OK, gonna play a little Devil's Advocate for the sake of discussion. Will addressing all of the above, which involves a fair amount of work on both a one time and ongoing basis, actually make a significant difference in the amount of SE traffic to the sites? OR... Would that time be better spent cultivating other sources of traffic? __________________ Latex Vixens Babes In Boots Well Heeled Women Dressing For Sex Stocking Vixens

2012-01-09, 03:08 PM	#6
LowryBigwood Don't get discouraged; it's usually the last key that opens the lock... Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Dallas, Tx Posts: 1,203	Very true Toby. Well said. I'm betting that some could do better one way and others would do better with another method. What I would wonder... Is the traffic really half as good as seo traffic? I myself would have a hard time believing that but I'm not saying it isn't true for you. __________________ Free Porn Buddy \| Porn Buddy Blog

2012-01-09, 08:45 PM	#7
dunc You can now put whatever you want in this space :) Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Australia Posts: 658	Interesting thread, and I'm following. I think in the long term what UW is getting at with SEO will be beneficial.... maybe even to the point of creating a new hybrid Links List type thing. 100 links per page is fine according to Google... but this includes all links, sponsors and inbound links. I agree with most of the things - but too many ad spots is one I am not sure about, some mainstream blogs have shit loads - even if they are small and they still rank highly. I also know that page titles are very important... so if you paginate, then you must have a unique page title. Lots of good information can extracted from this Google SEO Guideline pdf __________________ Good, Cheap Wordpress Themes

2012-01-09, 11:29 PM	#8
Useless Certified Nice Person Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Dirty Undies, NY Posts: 11,268	The largest failing point of the link list model has always been its integral dependence on search engine traffic. Most TGPs and MGPs use traffic trading scripts, which, with hindsight being 20/20, is fair to say was a brilliant move right from the start. Toby is most likely right, that putting one's efforts elsewhere would most probably reap greater and faster rewards. My ideas are intended to help the link lists that will always be link lists, in one form or another. Obviously, there is a stubbornness to us and we'd like to keep the dream alive. Anyone with the tiniest inkling of SEO knowledge would look at a link list and be amazed that they still get SE traffic at all. We pretty much do everything Google warns us not to do. We are reciprocal link-farming keyword-stuffing fools - and sort of proud of it. The pure beauty of it is, we no longer have to worry about the sky falling. It has already fallen. We're walking on it right now. Whatever changes we make, should help us in the long run. __________________ Click here to purchase a bridge I'm selling. Last edited by Useless; 2012-01-09 at 11:31 PM..

2012-01-10, 06:19 AM	#9
fetishbank Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand! Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Italy Posts: 93	I'm going to say something that may even seem stupid... the number of sites is growing exponentially. All sites are doing SEO optimization to be on top of the search results, but as a matter of fact, only a few can be listed in top. So, it is just not possible to be in the top of the results for many keyword. At most you can get a good ranking for a few of them. I'm not saying that SEO optimization is a waste of time, but I think we have to measure the time spent and the economic results achieved. For what concern my site, I do the basic optimization and I try to avoid the most common mistakes, for the rest I follow the Google suggestion: "just think about doing a good site". It sounds correct. If you've got the best site in the world you'll be ranked 1. If you're just one out of 10,000 same level competitors, you'll divide your space with other 10,000 sites... May I also remind you that most of the thing we think to know about SEO are often just ingenuous suppositions ? Google algorithms are much more smart than we can think... My point is: something CAN be done and HAS to be done, but do not expect miracles from SEO. __________________ Jay de Vos, Fetish Bank webmaster

2012-01-10, 10:40 AM	#10
Useless Certified Nice Person Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Dirty Undies, NY Posts: 11,268	You can assume that some of us know what we are talking about. Miracles aren't on the wish list. __________________ Click here to purchase a bridge I'm selling.

2012-01-10, 11:14 AM	#12
LowryBigwood Don't get discouraged; it's usually the last key that opens the lock... Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Dallas, Tx Posts: 1,203	All this is good to think about. But, it seems as some of you are pretending like you'd go after "free porn" "porn" "xxx" and stuff like that for keywords. That would be really tough to rank for no doubt. However, there are plenty of keywords that could be gone after that could/would provide good quality traffic. I just don't think you should neglect your seo, but I am well aware of the time constraints involved when you have to run a LL, TGP, or MGP. So, for some it's probably better not to worry much on seo, while others may do very well at it. __________________ Free Porn Buddy \| Porn Buddy Blog

2012-02-26, 07:49 PM	#13
CaptainJSparrow You can now put whatever you want in this space :) Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Louisiana Posts: 511	Another problem with the way that we used to do Link Lists, and the way that some folks still do them, is the penalty that we all got (I'm pretty sure that a bunch of sites still have it) for unnatural link schemes. An example, this page: http://www.freeporncorner.com/amateu...brina-deep/uk/ That page links to 15 Link Lists, using a link to the category page and a link to the index page of each one. A link from a page like that not only does not help your site, it will hurt it as far as Google is concerned. It is blatantly an attempt to artificially inflate link popularity which will get you penalized. Couple that with the fact that back in the day we had what, somewhere around 25 Link Lists getting over 100k per day from Google and another 75 or so that got less but decent Google traffic AND the free site builders were submitting to all of us? You have a small number of Link Lists getting backlinks built up every day from a finite number of free sites (each one creating multiple new pages to submit most days of the week). It became a maze where Googlebot just bounced around all of those sites, from the low quality pages linking to the Link Lists and then back out again to all of the low quality pages. That is a direct path to one thing, an algorithmic Penalty. Does anyone else here have a penalty on one of their old Link List url's (or maybe all of them) that expires every 60 days and then is reapplied within about 5 days? Go look at your Google Analytics and see if you have traffic spikes roughly every 60 days. I recently compared the backlinks showed by Google's Webmaster Tools of two of the url's that I used to have as Link Lists. I was amazed to find that over 650 of the first 1000 links were shared by both sites. That's over 65%. What percentage of the backlinks to Greenie's Link O Rama do ya'll think your Link Lists share with him. GreenGuy, what percentage of your current group of Link Lists' backlinks are shared by them all. There are sites that take submissions and require a link back that do well at Google. One example is FreeOnes.com. The difference is that they don't have a group of sites, like we had, that are all interlinked (hell we all used to link our category pages, my amateur to yours, yours back to mine) and receiving backlinks from the same sites to all of them. Back to that page that I used as an example: http://www.freeporncorner.com/amateu...brina-deep/uk/ a decent amount of the links on that page go to pages, and sites, that no longer exist. The owner of that site would be better off, IMHO, if they removed all of those old pages like that. Pages like this actually hurt the whole site that they are on because of the broken outgoing links and they will hurt the sites that they link to because of the unnatural link scheme penalty. IMHO to do a Link List now-a-days, getting them to link back to you from each page that they submit would actually hurt your seo efforts. The links out should be no followed...I mean those pages aren't gonna place in the serps, ever, anyway. I think that a Link List could do well if it exchanged (A-B_C)links with sites other than the ones submitting to them. You don't have to be a tube to place in the top 10 for highly sought after keywords...look at "Free Porn" PinkWorld.com consistently shows up in the top 10. Last edited by CaptainJSparrow; 2012-02-26 at 07:54 PM..

2012-02-27, 09:28 AM	#14
LeRoy "Young dumb and full of cum" Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Porn Valley Posts: 2,370	^^ Just do was captain did... start a link list and fuck your submitters by converting it to a tube. Thanks Captain Oh and thank you for dropping all those link trades we had too. Classy __________________ JAPANESE ADULT AFFILIATE PROGRAM

2012-02-27, 11:21 AM	#15
CaptainJSparrow You can now put whatever you want in this space :) Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Louisiana Posts: 511	Ummm LeRoy, we ran Link Lists for what, 7 years maybe more? Not exactly starting and then fucking your submitters. Over that 7 year period our links lists, combined, got over 200k per day from the Search Engines and a lot of that traffic flowed back to the submitters. I wouldn't exactly call that fucking someone over. When Link Lists died we switched to Tube sites. We told everyone back then that we were gonna experiment with Tube Sites and told folks when we switched over. I don't get the attitude that you have of once a LL always a LL. For SE traffic it is a bad model.

2012-02-27, 11:28 AM	#16
Greenguy The Original Greenguy (Est'd 1996) & AVN HOF Member - I Crop Pics For Thumbs In My Sleep Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Blasdell, NY (shithole suburb south of Buffalo) Posts: 41,754	I don't know if this means anything or not, but here it goes... In July of 2010 I opened Real Sexy Girlfriends. I did this site because, at the time, girlfriend sites were just starting to pop & I'm still a big fan of real amateur pics/vids. Also, I had a SHITLOAD of girlfriend free sites, so I could populate the categories with my own sites before it opened so that the pages would not look bare. Now, please note that NONE of those girlfriend free sites that I had already built linked back to the new link list - and they still don't. (of course, new free sites that I build do link back to the index) To get links flowing into the site, I asked for a lot of trades - most of which did not reciprocate But, my links to them remain on the pages because I'm lazy I also made up some table/text "ads" that I slapped around my hubs. Some were niche specific (see http://www.liveamateurlesbians.com/) and some were general & linked to each category (see http://www.adultwebsex.com/) I linked to each category page from all of my other link lists. I did as much as I could with my own traffic/sites - with the exception of all those free sites - that'd be WAY to much work & upload time to add a link to each of those. In October 2011 I joined Linkspun. In 5 months, I've set up 300+ inbound trades, most (if not all) coming off other girlfriend sites or amateurs & niche specific pages. The trades go to the main page as well as the category pages. I have no proof, but I do feel that this has helped out a great deal. So, a little over 1-1/2 years later where am I? I'd say it's doing good. It gets about 500 hits a day (50% referral traffic from inbound links & 40% search engine) I'm in the top 10 for many of the keywords that I targeted, the best being "sexy girlfriends" My analytics look like complete SHIT when you think about what a site should be: 2.17 Pages/Visit 00:01:37 Avg. Time on Site 64.28% Bounce Rate But, I am making sales off the ads/text on the category pages. I'm not gonna get rich off them, but YTD it's about 15 sales (4 with 1 program that's paying $45/signup in Feb ) Also, there is NOTHING else on this domain - no free sites or galleries of blogs - nothing. I did use some basic HTML5 tags on the pages, like: <header> <hgroup> <details> <summary> <nav> <section> <figure> <figcaption> <footer> My point in all this? It does still work....sorta I won't bore you with the details of Sunshine Lesbians, but I've employed the same strategy & had less-than stellar results (I will say it's only been open 9 months, so maybe it'll have similar results 9 months from now) Now, I know this way of marketing a link list may be looked at as difficult for some of you because I am a "BIG" guy But in reality, you can do the exact same thing I did. I still list category pages on the bottom of LOR's category pages, so you can get links from the big link lists. You should all have hubs where you can push a new site. You REALLY should be on Linkspun as it's a fucking fantastic way to make trades outside of your normal circle. Why don't I do more? Lately, I've been going back thru the existing link lists that I have & fixing them up a bit. But I do think that I will make another niche specific link list in the near future. So there ya go! Proof that the old model mixed with a little new thinking does work - or at least could work __________________ Promote POV Porn Cash By Building & Submitting Galleries to the Porn Luv Network

2012-03-25, 02:07 PM	#20
blinki bill Are you sure you're an accredited and honored pornographer? Join Date: May 2006 Location: London, UK Posts: 67	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. __________________ I'm looking for the question about the life, the universe and everything else

2012-03-26, 06:11 AM	#21
JK Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like women. You just have to read the manual and press the right button Join Date: Nov 2003 Posts: 157	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. __________________ To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems

2012-03-29, 02:47 PM	#23
CaptainJSparrow You can now put whatever you want in this space :) Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Louisiana Posts: 511	I remember back before there were Link Lists we all had websites full of free pictures that just dominated the serps (at first Yahoo and a few others, then Google when they came about) and we sent the traffic to the pay sites, usually on a pre-paid basis. The pay sites did not have the technology to see if the traffic was converting, they could just look at raw clicks coming in from your website. Then technology advanced, and Google took over the search part of the net and tracking software advanced where pay sites could track where the sales came from. I am not sure who came up with the concept of a Link List originally. I do remember that LL's were popular when the technology was not there to easily display movies on the internet. I suspect that the LL concept was created as a way to easily get a lot of back links for the purpose of getting high placements in Google. This was back when Google only valued gross back links without having the ability to value them accordingly. Hence, a lot of back links (even from new pages) got you top placements on Google which got you the absolute best traffic on the internet. Back then, the Link List owners did not want to create the content (which was picture galleries at the time) they just wanted to evaluate submissions and decide which galleries they would display. Of course, LL owners were all about aggressively exchanging links because they knew that the more links that they developed, the more search engine traffic their site got. The folks that created the "free" sites just wanted to create the galleries and get the instant hit of search engine traffic from the various lists that they submitted to. They traded links too, especially on their hubs, and some of them developed Link Lists too. At some point, the ability to display very short movies was created and some folks started submitting movie clips galleries in addition to picture galleries. TGP's were around back then but their traffic was mostly traded and not considered valuable. The Link Lists search engine traffic converted great though! Then technology advanced again and tube sites were created. We all hated the first tube sites because they had stolen content and they took over the search engines. Well, now-a-days tube sites rule the search engines. They do not have to have stolen content because most of the good pay sites offer free videos for the tube sites to use to promote the pay sites. The ability for any webmaster to easily create a tube site with the actual content that the surfer is wanting combined with the fact that Google has used penalties to get rid of the middleman, in this instance Link Lists, would suggest that trying to make Link Lists work again is comparable to trying to convince people to use 8 tracks instead of cd's or digital music options such as their phones, ipods, etc. Link Lists were a middle man. They did well because the back links and all of the text on the pages got them to the top of Google. Technology has advanced. Google has a penalty in place for link schemes and I dare say that every Link List has that penalty and every site linking (from numerous pages) to, or getting links from, a Link List has that penalty. I am not understanding why folks say that tube sites do not have good traffic and/or that they do not convert. As an example, one of my tubes sent 149,709 uniques to clients and made 106 sales (73 of which were mobile sales) over the last 6 days. Not horrible traffic or sales....matter of fact, not that far off what the old Link Lists used to do. Everyone wants search engine traffic, specifically Google. Now-a-days Google has the technology in place to see what a surfer does when he or she3 comes to your website. The engines can tell how many pages were viewed, how long the surfer stayed on your site, and whether he or she was satisfied that their search delivered what they were looking for. Google also places value on back links. Google looks at what sites your site links with. They are great at finding link schemes and penalizing them. Hence, I just can not envision a way that Link Lists can get past all of this and get decent traffic from the search engines to send to the submitters sites. Last edited by CaptainJSparrow; 2012-03-29 at 02:53 PM..

2012-03-31, 02:14 PM	#25
CaptainJSparrow You can now put whatever you want in this space :) Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Louisiana Posts: 511	I can't really speak for anyone other than myself and the free site owners that I knew back in the days, from about 1996 to 1999, we used to get paid ahead of time by the big sponsors. Of course, some tried to shave, but we always came to an agreement. For my sites, we had our own counters of outgoing traffic and the clients usually went with our numbers. We started out making about two cents per click and when it got competitive we were getting fourteen cents'ish. At that time, none of the sponsors that I worked with had the programs to specifically determine whether the traffic made them money or not. That said, they would do tests and when we would send traffic their sales went up significantly...most of the time. Google did always value higher pr links, but massive quantities of links (even low quality ones) could get a site higher in the serps. With Link Lists, the whole point of requiring the submitters to submit their pages to other Link Lists (most LL's required a table with other popular LL's in the table) was to have those pages get page rank, and traffic, from the other Link Lists in the hopes that those pages would increase your Link List's page rank and placement in the serps. Some folks would try to create a page specifically for your LL to see what type of traffic they were getting from you...the LL owners frowned upon this and would even black list those folks. The moral of the story though, IMHO, is that model of the Link List was created as a form of link bait to get back links for the purpose of getting your LL ranked higher in the serps. Everything was aimed at that, even the modifications that came about from the LL owners such as requiring the submitter to submit to other lists (otherwise they would only be getting your pr and you wanted them to get pr from the other lists and send it to you), having tertiary pages for each of your categories (to avoid direct page to page reciprocal linking), etc. Unfortunately, what it turned into over time was a group of Link Lists that linked to thousands of pages on a domain (actually often on multiple domains owned by the same person), those thousands of pages linking back to the Link List on each of the pages with a redundant table that had a link to both the index page and the category page, the majority of the Link Lists interlinking all of their category and index pages with the other Link Lists, and invariably those Link Lists interlinking with any other good sites that folks could find and then everyone else would see the link and get one too. Hence, a big cluster fuck of interlinked pages that exists to this day that Google has penalized the hell out of. Think of what is out there, just from the examples that I posted earlier in this thread. Thousands of old pages from years ago, that have a grey bar for page rank...this means that Google does not value these pages at all. They are considered a bad neighborhood. Hence, if you are a webmaster that submitted to the Link Lists and you have hundreds or thousands of these grey barred pages on your domain, then you will never get significant Google traffic to that domain, as long as you keep those pages up, because those old bad pages make Google consider your domain a bad neighborhood. If you own a Link List and you still have links to those old pages somewhere on your domain then you are linking to a bad neighborhood and have a penalty. Also, if your Link List has too many links from those old pages, you have a penalty for that. Google caught on to this scheme to artificially inflate your sites position in the serps years ago and there is just no way for these sites (the hub domains of the submitters and the Link Lists) to get out of that penalty until a decent percentage of those pages are deleted off the servers and the Link Lists delete their old pages that have the links to those bad pages.