You’ll find posts titled “I’m looking to boost my index and category PR” on every adult Webmaster message board. If you don’t read between the lines, these link requests are blatant attempts to cheat.You’ll find posts titled “I’m looking to boost my index and category PR” on every adult Webmaster message board. If you don’t read between the lines, these link requests are blatant attempts to cheat. Why? They result in artificial linkage to influence link popularity / PageRankTM (PR), and will get all participating sites penalized or even banned sooner or later. Artificial linking (like shared links tables on many domains or other mass link swaps) is intentional cheating. Google can detect it and will not reward it.

Since Webmasters asking for category page link trades obviously have the right ideas, I assume most of them do not cheat intentionally. They just don’t know that following bad advice on message boards can get their butts grilled by the engines. Forget everything you’ve heard about “advantages of PR boosting,” it is not true and it does not work. Every attempt to solely boost PR is useless, and dangerous. PR helps if on-page and off-page optimizing is done properly. High PR alone does not boost your rankings on the search engine result page (SERP).

PageRank (“Page” from Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, not from page) tries to follow traffic streams. It ranks Web pages more or less based on weighting of inbound links. Measuring the weight of a vote (link), it considers a couple of factors. The PR of the source page of an inbound link (the number of links on the source page, etc.) plays a role, but Google has improved the PR algorithm during the last years. There are other factors that you cannot find in public papers, and especially not on message boards. Better forget the technical stuff and link naturally with your visitor in mind. Google will reward your honesty with a higher PR.

Furthermore, PR is only one factor when it comes to rankings on the SERPs. The nearly useless toolbar PR displayed is totally overestimated. Since every idiot and his grandpa out there have something to contribute in public PR discussions, Webmasters and search engine optimizers have forgotten everything about the purpose of PR. PR is meant to emulate surfing. By ranking votes, it tries to estimate which links on a page a surfer will click. The first version used a dampening factor to take into account that a real surfer won’t click every link on a page. Nowadays the algorithm is more sophisticated. You can’t hack it and you won’t understand this technology deeply. Hence, make your decisions based on common sense.

When you’re after targeted traffic (coming from related votes) for your category pages, a reasonable planned link swap campaign is the way to go. Always remember, you want deep inbound links with targeted traffic, which you won’t get from a more or less useless PR boost. You want your category pages recommended by other (related) Web pages. Surfers shall follow these links. SE ranking algorithms, made to fulfill their users’ interests, shall recognize these links too, and the engines shall send you some extra traffic. In exchange you recommend the other site’s content (categorized site listings) on your category pages.

Well thought out, it works perfectly, as long as these links are on-topic, visible and prominent, and both sides are valuable resources… sort of like theme authorities. Your category page becomes a theme authority, when you manage it to compile a list of valuable on-topic links (site / gallery listing), each link dedicated to a related sub-topic, describing the sub-topic in anchor text and surrounding unlinked text. Long descriptions and keywords in site titles work best. Also, your category page’s title, description tag, headings, body text and even text ads and ALT text of banners should be on-topic, as well as the anchor text of your internal links leading to your category page. Split your huge categories into smaller pages, each carrying not more than 100 links.

Do not hide your link trades but link prominently. Use on-topic keywords as anchor text in your outgoing links, and request on-topic keywords in inbound links. Swap text links, not buttons. Additionally, improve every link with a TITLE attribute, carrying keyword variations, not repetitions. In plain English: link naturally and valuably for your visitors. A natural link is an honest recommendation to your visitor, leading to an on-topic authority. Topic gets defined in the link’s anchor text, TITLE attribute, and surrounding unlinked text. SEs will reward your effort and send you targeted traffic.

Don’t put too much effort in acquiring homepage inbound links. Your links list’s homepage is the most useless page of your domain. Surfers are scanning, many of them won’t scroll down two screens of ads and recips, and you’ll lose even more on the following full page ad (FPA), hopefully visiting your sponsor, but more likely leaving your site. Better to feed your category pages and your category index page with link swaps. Ignore the PR of your link partner’s pages. If the site is nice and you like it, some surfers will like it too, and it will have traffic. Even brand new sites with no Google PR can have some traffic (currently and/or in the future). Provide an easy link swap procedure like Free Porno Search.

Bottom line – Ignore Google’s PageRankTM and trade text links on category pages for traffic with nicely designed, well maintained and related sites which have user-friendly navigation, and don’t cheat. Follow this guideline and your site will become an authority hub getting nice targeted traffic.

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 YNOT NEWS.