Sebastian recently
fired up an experiment so I thought I’d post this up to give his experiment some link juice. While I’m at it, I’ll write a short rant about why optimizing porn sites isn’t easy.
- Digg/reddit/stumbleupon are nearly useless. Of course, there are alternatives and workarounds, but really, life would be easier if digg had a nsfw section.
- Everyone is scared of linking to you. Since almost everyone uses either affiliate content shared by 1,000 people or Matrix Content that looks all the same, there’s no such thing as unique content. Mainstream people are scared of linking to porn sites. And adult webmasters will not link to each other ever unless you set up a link exchange. There is no such thing as editoral links in the porn niche (except for sex blogs, but those are for female bloggers; men generally suck at talking on and on about sex).
- 90% of adult webmasters still don’t get the concept of one-way links. Major adult sites like penisbot was built on reciprocal linking done on a mass scale. They accept dozens of sites a day which are required to link to them and they in tern link to those sites. Those webmasters don’t see massive recip link networks as a link scheme because the links are “relevant” - as if Google could tell the difference between a page about [girl+girl action] and [slippery dildos].
- There’s nothing to write about. Porn is about pics and video - not text. It’s like optimizing for flash - its a nightmare because you have to spend hours typing bullshit just so your ranks for something. Yeah, you can write paysite reviews, publish chat logs with Brooke Banner or some other hot starlet that does weekly cam shows, post barely sfw videos on youtube, and talk about a girlfriend that’s been annoying you. But on the whole, you’ll end up writing alot of jibberish and saying stuff you don’t mean.
- No matter who links to you and who you link to, you’re in a bad neighborhood. If real estate sites got bitchslapped for excessive reciprocal linking, well, porn sites’ been in hot water for years. Google doesn’t trust links in adult; even a site with over 300,000 links is stuck at TBPR 5, a sign that most of those links aren’t passing much value. But even if each link only pass a trickle of juice, 300k crap links add up to #1 ranking for terms that drive over 80,000 visits/day from Google.
- Running AdWord ads is a challenge. Conversions are phenomenal; but the teen porn flag is easy to trip (different reviewers have different opinions on what is and isn’t compliant) and one disapproval too many can get your account killed. A Yahoo! Directory link costs a small fortune. Apparently Yahoo never heard of a level playing field or they assume, like VISA does, that porn sites make way more money than mainstream sites so adult webmasters can afford to pay more every year.
And a few reasons why optimizing porn is easier than mainstream
- Google image search generates a ton of sales. I have a few images on this domain but none of them makes me any money. Not so with adult traffic. If you know how to nail top position, you really don’t even need organic search traffic. One key is to have as many thumbs on a page as possible (and of course the page has to be in the main index - unless Google changed that up). Post a ton of thumbs on your home page (yeah, Google image search is primitive - PageRank is a bigger factor here, since anchor text doesn’t work). Use huge pics - which helps you rank higher if a surfer filters a search by image size, and use framebreaker JS to prevent people from just looking at one pic then backpedaling to Google porn TGP.
- Yahoo Video. You can generate 600~1000 uniques a day per a set of videos thanks to Yahoo Video. The trick is to make sure traffic converts; otherwise your bandwidth bill may eat into your profits, especially if each vid is big (if each vid is 5mb, 1000 downloads = 5 gigs/day)
- There are thousands of long tails you can optimize for. Model names, celebrity names, paysite names, niches, superniches, DVD titles - an endless stream of keywords you can monetize, some with little to no competition.
Top 7 Reasons Why Optimizing Porn Sites is Hard - Read More...
