SITE DESIGN TIPS

This series of articles describes the concept of building search engine friendly TGP2s and TGP2 galleries. It applies to old-fashioned TGPs too, but you may want to consider giving the newer TGP2 paradigm a try.

Part 1 of 3

Most TGP2s rely on traffic trades, which become more and more incestuous.SITE DESIGN TIPS

This series of articles describes the concept of building search engine friendly TGP2s and TGP2 galleries. It applies to old-fashioned TGPs too, but you may want to consider giving the newer TGP2 paradigm a try.

Part 1 of 3

Most TGP2s rely on traffic trades, which become more and more incestuous. We need to bring fresh traffic to the TGP2 community to make more money with less free content. Search engine (SE) traffic is the most valuable traffic of all. Therefore every TGP2 should function as a funnel to suck this traffic into the TGP2 system. This will happen when all TGP2s are able to receive SE traffic. Most TGP2s are not indexed or are ranked very low. That’s a bad thing for the TGP2 owner, the gallery makers and TGP2 in general.

There are more great traffic sources out there, but SE traffic is cheaply targeted traffic, so lets use it…

TGP2 means less free porn, less bandwidth, less costs of content and more advertising space on galleries. TGP2 has proven that the profits per visitor are higher than on conventional TGP sites. TGP2.com recently reported that click-through rates (CTR) on TGP2s to the sponsor are six times what they are on TGP1s. TGP2 owners and TGP2 gallery makers continuously confirm this fact as well. CTRs on TGP2 galleries are – due to the more aggressive advertising – up to twelve times better than on TGP1 galleries.

By the way, “building SE friendly sites” does not mean offensive “search engine optimizing” (SEO). Many SEO artists use dirty tricks and take a high risk of getting banned for life by the SEs. I’ll try to explain how a spider will see your site and what you can do to help it to rank your site better without cheating. This is my first and most important hint:

Never ever cheat with the search engines! You will be caught!

A book would be needed to describe all the SE related aspects you need to know, but I’m not a SE guru and English is a foreign language to me, so I’ll concentrate on the basics and look forward to reading your feedback. Do not expect SE traffic to come in immediately after you’ve changed your site. It takes at least a few weeks, sometimes even a few months to see the results. The best search engine to track results is Google. They spider the whole Internet every month and update like clockwork in the last week. You can preview the next index at http://www2.google.com/. It contains the crawler results of the past four to six weeks. It’s also a good idea to pay Inktomi for frequent crawls. Before I bother you with details, allow me a few thoughts to define the context.

Your TGP2 and your galleries are just parts of a bigger concept

That’s not only a marketing issue, but also it’s relevant to your search engine optimizing too. TGP2s and TGP2 galleries are an excellent instrument to feed pay sites, AVS premium sites and whatever you may operate besides your TGP2. It’s important that you know your niche to up sell your visitors and it’s important that you keep the search engines in mind with all your activities on the Internet.

With every design and every line of code you write you should have this “big picture” in mind. Include and integrate your TGP2 stuff into the cluster of URLs on your servers. Build logical paths the spiders can follow through your entire empire and try to hold the crawls on your domains. For every outgoing link you should have a few inbound links.

Look at the picture showing the structure of a single TGP2 domain above, then extend your view and adapt the principle with your complete network of sites in mind. Think of your context and think big. You’re operating a network (of your sites) in a bigger network (the adult web). Build clean interfaces (outgoing and incoming votes/links) you can manage with little effort. See yourself as a central point and work hard to build many paths which allow you to suck traffic (visitors) from many sources while giving away nothing or less than you receive.

Go back 2,000 years to Rome and study their spider web of streets, all leading to the Empire’s centre. Your understanding of this principle will help you to build your own empire on the World Wide Web and to operate it with success. Your sites are your legions, the search engines are your allied troops and all they need to conquer the market are lots of broad paths to your signup pages.

Trade votes to increase your page ranking

To boost your SE page rankings, the first step is to feed your TGP2 from other sites you own, especially when the sites are high ranked, “trusted and valuable sites”. Note that the SE sees a link as a vote. A vote from a high ranked site counts more than a link from a gallery page. Page ranking is a conglomerate of weight of content and weight of link popularity.

Content rich sites get higher rankings than poor sites. Content is everything a spider can see (text, descriptive and categorized links, images with ALT tags, etc.). You don’t need thousands of pages to own a “content rich site.” I will discuss later how to give your TGP2 content (links and galleries) more importance.

Link popularity is the amount of weighted links (votes) to your site. Weighted votes consider source and target. Links from “poor sources” like reciprocal links on galleries or free sites do not count. Links from high ranked sources count more. Always try to get high quality votes. Less is more in this case and (tons of) low quality votes are destructive.

You can check the ranking of a page with the Google Toolbar. Install it, then go to any URL and look at the slider. If the slider is disabled, the page is not yet ranked. That’s not a bad thing. Usually it will be ranked in the next monthly index, but in some cases the page/site is banned for cheating. That’s a bad thing and you should never ever link to it. If a mouseover displays a ranking of zero, Google considers the page as “poor”. Don’t link to it, except if you know the URL is brand new. Galleries are mostly not ranked or zero ranked. That’s not bad for the TGP2 owner as long as the domain of the gallery maker has at least one page ranked 1/10 or better. A good ranking of an adult site is 4/10 – 6/10, there are not many adult sites ranked higher.

How do you find out whether a site is banned by the SE? Just do a few searches for words you expect to find on the target domain like “sex site:www.domain.com”, “home site:www.domain.com”, “next site:www.domain.com”, “xxx site:www.domain.com” etc. (syntax varies from SE to SE). If you get no results, the domain is new and not yet spidered or possibly banned. A whois will tell you whether the domain is new. A domain that is a few months old is still new for the engines. When a domain was parked or not used for a longer time it’s also “new”. At this point, check another search engine and use other information you have about the site. There is no way to get this information for sure except asking the SE. Don’t laugh, it works. Sometimes they need a while to respond or sometimes never reply, but you may be lucky.

Don’t make the mistake to mix top ranked search results for particular keyword phrases with page ranking. You may have a #5 spot on the SE results page for a keyword phrase with a low or middle ranked page. That only means that you do not have much competition on this keyword phrase. If you operate a high ranked site you will get top spots on the first index page for the keywords that you’re dreaming of.

You can boost your page ranking when you trade votes (links) with other higher ranked sites. You can boost the page ranking of a “new” site when you link to it from a well-ranked URL. Be careful! Do not exchange links with everybody and their grandma! Incoming and outgoing links also may decrease your page ranking or get your site banned. Also, do not participate in link circles. You should trade links/votes only with trusted webmasters. And you must not cheat with the engines. Be honest, if you think a vote could be valuable for the surfer, then trade. In most cases the search engine will follow your opinion. Never trade using invisible or tricky links. Link visible – that does not mean link prominent.

Understand that trading votes has nothing to do with trading traffic. Trading votes means trading visible, static links, which are never removed. A few surfers will find these links and produce a little traffic. Your trading script will take care of it. Don’t whine and cancel the trade when you send another site a few hits, which are never returned. The traffic will be returned in the future – from the search engines and with much higher quality! Trading votes with a low traffic site can be more effective than trading traffic (of low quality) with a high traffic site, as long as the low traffic site is a high ranked, “trusted and valuable site” in the eyes of the search engines.

What you should do is trade votes with other TGP2 webmasters and theme related web sites. You’ll see the best results when your trade partner’s site is in the same niche or at least dedicated to a relevant theme. If you and your trade partners own many domains, consider setting up trades that are not bilateral. This kind of linking reflects better on the “real Net”. Again: don’t cheat the engines!

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/.