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Preparing AVS Sites For Outside Traffic
Posted On 03 Oct 2002
AVS FORUM
-b/b-n former days, AVSs (Age Verification Services) provided lots of traffic from the links list of participating sites. Many AVS webmasters made shitloads of money from the AVS links list.AVS FORUM
-b/b-n former days, AVSs (Age Verification Services) provided lots of traffic from the links list of participating sites. Many AVS webmasters made shitloads of money from the AVS links list. They created tons of new sites, submitted to the AVS and the cash flowed in. Most AVS sites are designed for AVS links list traffic, following the AVS policy and therefore not suitable to convert outside traffic from search engines, adult links lists and so on.
Depending on the source of traffic, different sales pitches are needed to sell AVS passwords. To AVS members you want to sell upgrades from regular to premium memberships. To visitors coming from a SERP (search engine results page) or a TGP/LL (thumbnail gallery post/links list) you’ll sell your content plus access to all other participating sites and you’ll primarily promote the benefits of an AVS membership.
Nowadays AVSs don’t send a reasonable amount of traffic from the AVS links list any more. Also, this little traffic is usually upgrade traffic, not signup traffic. AVS Webmasters need to acquire outside traffic to their sites. Nearly every approach to hunt for outside traffic requires modifications of tour pages, which are not permitted by the AVS, especially implementation of reciprocal links.
Since AVS tours can’t be used to up-sell outside traffic, many AVS webmasters just mirror their tours, plaster the warning pages with reciprocal links and submit a bunch of nearly identical pages to every links list, (adult) search engine and traffic boosters like Niched Hubs. This approach has a nasty side effect. Major search engines may consider all these similar pages as index SPAM and penalize the site. This hurts, because targeted traffic from major search engines is the most valuable and still best converting traffic of all.
This article describes the technical procedure for converting a site designed to leech AVS links list traffic to a site which is able to make the best usage of traffic from multiple sources, avoiding search engine penalties for duplicated content or usage of fraudulent doorway pages.
Initial State
Let’s begin with a simple start position and discuss alternatives later on.
SiteDirectory/index.html is the page listed on the AVS links list. Visitors are guided from index.html over tour1.html and tour2.html to the signup page with the AVS login script.
Crawling search engines like Altavista, Inktomi and Google found the site on the AVS links list, followed the links, indexed the complete tour and produced a little traffic, but the major source of traffic is the AVS links list. Perhaps the site was submitted to other places too. You do not want to lose a single visitor coming from external sources, thus you need to isolate the AVS links list traffic first.
Isolating AVS Links List Traffic
It’s easy to change the site URL in the AVS lounge, but it’s impossible to do the same at major search engines, adult links lists, etc.
Create a subdirectory, name it ‘avstour’ or so and copy all *.html files to this directory. Change all relative image URLs from ‘image.gif’ to ‘../image.gif’ and make other necessary changes.
Now disallow search engine spiders indexing the AVS tour pages. On avstour/index.html, between <head> and </head>, insert a new META tag:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”NOINDEX,FOLLOW,ALL”>
Insert two visible, but not prominent links, one leading to the domain’s root and one leading to the upper site directory. <A HREF=”../” style=”text-decoration:none; color:#000000;” TITLE=”your site’s title”>any keyword of the visible body text</A> will suppress underlined anchor text, replace ‘#000000’ by your text color. SE spiders following the link on the AVS links list will still find the tour but will not index the isolated AVS tour.
On tour1.html, tour2.html and join.html insert this META tag:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”>
Upload the new directory, clear your browser’s cache, test the AVS tour and ensure the AVS login script works. Then change the site’s URL at the AVS to ‘http://www.yourdomain.com/sitedirectory/avstour/’.
Search Engine Optimization
Before you create alternative entrances for different sources of outside traffic, ensure the tour is search engine friendly. Remember, search engine spiders eat only links and text, they can’t read text on graphics. You need to put in keyword rich page titles, ALT and heading tags (H1, H2) and a fair amount of visible body text on every page.
You want the first tour page listed on the SERPs prior to secondary pages, thus make the spiders think the first tour page is the most important page. Most AVS tours use a straightforward internal linking. The join page is linked from every tour page but there are no links back. Especially when the first tour page lacks third party inbound links, the spider will think the join page is more important. Many SEs list only one URL per site on the SERPs, usually the ‘most important page.’ The advantage of indexed signup pages without links to the previous tour pages is not so exciting. You may attract some SE traffic, but the punters won’t sign up, because they didn’t see your preview pictures nor read your good arguments to buy an AVS password.
Straightforward linking is a bad habit and far away from a user-friendly site design. Interlink all tour pages, and visitors and SE spiders will reward an easy navigation. For example, use a left sided navbar with buttons and/or a textual navbar at the bottom of the page:
Home | Keyword1 | Keyword2 | Keyword3 | Enter
Now, in theory, all pages have the same importance, because each page links to every page. In fact the importance of the first tour page is higher, as long as at least one link from another page outside the tour leads to it.
You can boost the SE ranking of your most targeted keywords even with ‘Home’ and ‘Enter’ links using the TITLE argument in the A tag:
<A HREF=”index.html” TITLE=”keyword phrase”>Home</A>
Put readable, keyword rich sentences in the TITLE text and visitors will see this text displayed as tool tip on mouse-overs.
This is an example of a search engine friendly and user-friendly tour page:
Please note that this design is known as extremely SE compliant, but there are lots of other approaches producing great SE traffic. On the signup page ensure the AVS login script is prominently placed (and centered or right aligned with text explaining the AVS benefits on the left) near the top of the page. You won’t believe how many punters don’t know how to scroll down.
Create Multiple Entrances
First of all, don’t overestimate the ‘traffic leaks’ of reciprocal links. Recip traffic is very low. That means, not more than 1-2% of your visitors will click a reciprocal link. Also, you can use TARGET=”_blank” in the A tag to open the links list in a new window (forget TARGET=”_new”, don’t use this argument). Check the rules, the major LLs and TGPs don’t allow links opening a new window.
Compile a list of traffic sources. Start at The AVS List and The Links Machine and add other traffic sources when you find them. Sort the traffic sources:
1. Not requiring a reciprocal link
Submit your SE friendly tour. Don’t put up a recip (unless you anticipate a huge amount of traffic in exchange for a recip… see 2 and 3).
2. Clean links
Mouse-over the links and check the source code. Clean links lead to your site without prefixes. Install the Google Toolbar and activate the advanced options. If the links page of your site’s category shows a PageRank greater or equal to 4/10, trade a link even with small links lists on an indexable page which is part of your tour (see below). The same goes for the big links lists obviously, even when their category pages sometimes are ranked less than 4/10, they deserve a reciprocal link on the main page.
If the links list has a PageRank between 1 and 3, use an indexable page, which isn’t part of the main tour, but linked from your site. Otherwise use a not indexable page for the link exchange. Google penalizes your site for links to so-called ‘bad neighborhoods’ (banned and penalized sites). A site ranked 0/10 may be penalized or brand new. As long as you don’t know the reason for this low ranking, be careful. You won’t get penalized by Google for links on pages Googlebot can’t fetch from your server.
3. Prefixed links
If the links to listed sites are prefixed (e.g. http://linkslistdomain/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?http://yourdomain/yoursite/, http://linkslistdomain/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?id=anyInteger …) use a not indexable page for the link exchange.
4. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Create a separate not indexable entrance and add the lowest available fee to the page’s TITLE tag, e.g. <TITLE>YourSite’sTitle plus VeryShortContentSummary plus ($1.99)</TITLE>. Test the page using different browsers and ensure the price is displayed. Check your server stats frequently and compare the number of incoming hits to the provider’s stats.
Not Indexable Entrance Pages
First of all, don’t use the technique described below to cheat honest links lists, you will get blacklisted. You need non-indexable entrance pages to avoid search engine penalties when you trade traffic with suspect sites. It’s not the best idea to collect all links lists on the ‘Net, spread recips over many mirrored warning pages and submit the URLs. You do link exchanges for traffic and link popularity and your time is valuable. Don’t bother with useless trades and don’t offend honest links lists using mirrored recip URLs.
Create a warning page or copy your first tour page. Store the page as ‘main.html’, ‘welcome.html’ or so or create a new subdirectory and use index.html (preferred). Put in a NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW robots tag and store the file in a directory which is disallowed for SE spiders in your robots.txt! Do not link to this mirrored entrance page. Don’t put in more than ten recips per page, make a new copy for the next ten links lists and so on. Do not use figures in filenames. An index17.html, welcomeX.html or sitedirectory/LL17/index.html won’t get you listed.
It’s a good idea to upload a separate tour for these traffic sources. Link from all separated entrance pages to the same second tour page and implement generic ‘Back’ links on that page (instead of a valid URL use the HREF argument “javascript:history.back()”).
Don’t forget to put in NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW robots tags on all pages. Separate all not indexable pages in a subdirectory, then use the robots.txt file in your domain’s root directory to lock out all robots. Yourdomain.com/robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
Some links lists use robots to check recips. A few of these robots will request your robots.txt and delete the submission, if access for all robots is disallowed. Well, your goal is to lock out spiders of major search engines, thus lock out these and allow access to all other robots:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-agent: Lycos
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-agent: T-Rex
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-agent: Scooter
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-agent: Mercator
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-Agent: Excite
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-Agent: FAST
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-Agent: Arachnoidea
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-Agent: KIT-Fireball
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-Agent: moget
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-Agent: Gulliver
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
User-Agent: teoma
Disallow: /sitedirectory/tour/
Please note that the list above may be incomplete and/or outdated when you read this article! Refer to JafSoft and create your own list of search engine spiders. Do not link to domains that are banned or penalized by the engines. If you really want to trade traffic with a site considered ‘bad neighborhood’, use a redirect script on a useless domain instead.
Indexable Entrance Pages
You can exchange links with links lists providing you with steady traffic (your listing stays on a high ranked category page and won’t be moved after a few days) and a reasonable PageRank (Google’s toolbar shows 4/10 or better on the category links page of the links list or at least at the main page) on your first tour page or a separate, indexable entrance page, which is interlinked with your tour.
For low traffic and low PageRank link trades create a warning page or copy and modify your first tour page. Store the page as ‘main.html’, ‘welcome.html’ or something similar, or create a new subdirectory and use index.html (preferred). Make sure to provide different text content and layouts on each indexable entrance page to avoid SE penalties for duplicated content. Link to the new page from another interlinked page – some SE spiders dislike URLs lacking internal inbound links.
When you do permanent, long lasting link exchanges with high ranked sites (Google PageRank 4/10+) use the first page of your search engine friendly tour. Also implement the Niched Hubs code snippets on the first tour page. This high quality links will boost your SE rankings.
Alternatives
You can create front ends on other domains too, but don’t submit them to DMOZ and other directories. Other than search engine crawlers, directory editors will check out your content and won’t list your mirrored tours.
Many Webmasters put premium sites on their own domains and add (regular) feeder sites later on. This enables you to show the search engine spider a large, content rich domain. On the domain’s root index.html put links to the feeders below the ‘enter’ link leading to the premium site’s tour. On all feeders (not so prominent) link back to the root’s index and promote the premium site. You can expand this structure with free sites, TGP galleries and so on.
This example shows how different traffic streams can be merged. It should be applied only when the sales pitch on tour1.html and the following pages are pretty generic. There are lots of other scenarios, so be creative.
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. Sebastian initiated the first niched hub in 2002 and is the author of other search engine insights here at YNOTNews.
