SITE DESIGN TIPS

General hints on search engine friendly design for TGP2

Part 2 of a 3-part series [Part 1]

1. Don’t ask for nor give reciprocal links (recips) on galleries.SITE DESIGN TIPS

General hints on search engine friendly design for TGP2

Part 2 of a 3-part series [Part 1]

1. Don’t ask for nor give reciprocal links (recips) on galleries. Never.

Recips won’t bring you a reasonable amount of traffic but they can decrease your page ranking and you can get banned because of stupid useless recips:

Outgoing recips on your galleries leading to a site which is considered “bad” by the search engine (SE) will decrease your ranking. From the SE’s point-of-view you’re responsible for links to a site which is banned for cheating and the SE will penalize you. You cannot monitor all sites you’re linking to. Once you’re banned, it’s too late.

Incoming recips on galleries you’ve listed on your TGP2 may decrease your ranking when the gallery is a “not important” and/or “low quality” page from the SE’s POV. From the spider’s perspective, most galleries are unimportant, low quality pages. Links are seen as votes to the target URL, and the SE weighs the source when it ranks the target. Many low quality votes indicate a low quality target and/or indicate link spam. It’s that simple. Go ahead. Change your rules and remove all recips on your galleries.

2. Do not use dirty tricks like invisible, blind or hidden links.

Well, that’s borderline stuff. You need to put up links the surfer should not click for many reasons. But avoid text in background color, 1×1 pixel images and x-small text. The spider will follow “visible” text links if the font size is not less than (at least some) other text on the page. You will not be penalized when a linked keyword is not underlined and displayed with the same font color as unlinked text. Do not really hide links. There’s nothing to say against not so prominent links, but keep in mind that hidden links are an absolutely forbidden thing. Currently, it is possible to cheat the crawlers using external .css files that format (linked) text in background color. I suggest you redo all pages using that trick as soon as possible.

3. Do not build link farms and spider traps.

Never put up pages containing lots of links within yours and your friends’ domains to boost your link popularity. Highly sophisticated spiders have crazy algorithms to identify link farms as well as spider traps and you will get banned. Also, do not create link circles (every domain linking to every domain). Better link in trees/networks (domain1 linking to domain2 and domain3, domain2 linking to domain3 and domain4, domain3 linking to domain1 and domain5, etc.) without systematic patterns. That better reflects the “real Net”. You need many domains per niche/theme but it’s worth it. You won’t be penalized when you crosslink one or two dozen of your own domains, especially not if the domains are in the same block of IP addresses. But, such conglomerates tend to grow to a dangerous size, so keep it under control. Better to crosslink your domains in smaller niches.

4. Do not redirect pages.

The only reason to redirect is when you change the URL. Then use a META refresh of at least 8 – 10 seconds and a visible link leading to the new target. Delete the old URL when the new page is indexed. Never produce doorway pages. It is very important that the spider gets exactly the same content as the surfer, always and on every URL.

5. Do not rely on META tags.

META tags are fine but in most cases useless. Nowadays, most spiders simply ignore them. However, you still need them for a few SEs, so don’t forget them (you should have META tags on galleries and every page you create). Use a short keyword optimized (but not overloaded) description written in readable sentences and not more than four of five keywords / keyword phrases. Best is one keyword phrase of two or three words. More important is the page title and the visible text on the page as well as ALT tags. Title, META tags, visible text and ALT tags must feed the same keyword phrase.

6. Work daily on your link popularity.

Submit your site to DMOZ and all other catalogues / adult search engines that do not ask for recips. Always post with a signature containing your most important links. Try to get votes/links from high ranked sites. Do not try to boost your link popularity with tons of links. Less is more as long as the votes you receive are of a high quality.

7. Provide content.

Fancy images are nice, but the spider won’t honor your graphic skills. You must have enough text related to the theme of your site and matching the page title on every page. Text means readable text, headlines with H1 tags and ALT tags carrying a nice keyword phrase on every image including the site logo, thumbs and navigation buttons (rename your images, enable ALT tags with your thumbnail tool and it will generate nice keyword rich text).

8. Use hyphened domain names and keywords in file/directory names.

A domain name with hyphens will do better. For example, niche-fetish-sex-galleries.com will give your site more keyword relevance than nichefetishsexgalleries.com. Don’t rely on type-in-traffic. The same with directory names, domain.com/big-tits/index.html will do better than domain.com/catpages/bigtits.html. Make a new subfolder in the root for each category and take care that every directory has an index.(s)htm(l). A page named index.html will do better than big-tits.html.

Mask script generated pages, e.g. let your server parse .htm for PHP by adding AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm to your .htaccess file (when you’re using .html for static pages to reduce server load). Name your images corresponding to the ALT tag, e.g. when you have an ALT text of “Fat latina chicks giving blowjobs” the filename should be something like fat-latina-sluts-sucking-big-dicks.jpg (always plural). Also, use TITLE tags with all images.

I’m not a search engine guru, just a webmaster with a little experience. Please don’t blame me if you implement stuff based on my hints and it doesn’t work – that’s your risk. As always: try – test – test again – approve – implement. And point me to my errors by using my email address below. Thank you for your time and best of luck.

Sebastian, a former managing director of a German business consulting firm, stepped into the adult industry in December 1999. He operates mostly AVS sites and a content shop at KremlPorn.com. You can find a frequently updated version of this tutorial at http://www.sexwithfun.com/tgp2seo/.