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This article assumes that you know something about the adult industry and SEO. It is not intended for complete newbies. If you want a basic grounding then I suggest you try one of the many adult webmaster boards that are around.What this article is about are the tips and tricks other articles do not cover and specifically those around the new Google changes and as they affect Adult Webmasters in particular.

The Aging trap.

Google now has an aging algorithm, often referred to as a 'sandbox' that new sites are placed in to mature before they are ranked. This weeds out the thousands of sites that spring up and dissapear as soon as people realise just how much talent and persistance (or capital) it takes to make money on the web. It also stops the 'I can get you top ranking on the keyword 'swedishrobotsatemyhampster' in two weeks type SEO scams.

For the first 8 to 12 weeks your new sites will only appear on Google if somebody searches on your URL and types in for example 'kwikfire.com' then you will get usually just the index page. Sometimes there will be a description snippet with it and sometimes not. Then for the next 8-12 weeks you will get occasional search hits on unusual keywords in your page text (you DO have some text on your pages dont you?) when Google gets desperate. Then slowly your page will make its way (hopefully) up the rankings until it reaches its full pagerank and positioning after a total of 6-9 months.

You can drive yourself mad trying to improve your pagerank until your site is matured, because until then nothing will have an effect except breaking one of the rules which will lead to being banned (your URL dissapears completely) or being partially indexed (your URL dissapears but there is no description). Dont bother!

You can avoid this by buying an old domain *with the content still intact* which Google already knows about. BUT do not change the content too quickly or Google will think its a rewritten site .... back to square one. Change one keyword a week, one set of pages a day. The main index page change slower still. Force a Google re-index (see below) on at least a weekly basis.

URL

If you want a decent page rank at least one of your keywords should be present in your URL. Its a fallacy that its better to have a short URL in the adult world since nobody will type it in. Almost all your traffic will come from links that people click on or via search engines. So a url like adultpicsarehereforyou would be fine as far as the Se's are concerned and would score on adultpics picsarehere and keywords like that. If you want to or need to influence where the word splits are then adult-pics-are-here-for-you would force a split into conventional keywords.

Content

Content is now definitely king. By that I mean written content, not content in graphics. Search engines cannot see graphics. It is essential on every Index page to have as well as your links, warning statements etc at LEAST 200 words of well written descriptive text that contains your main keywords. To avoid the spammers who were producing machine generated sites full of crap Google seems to have implemented grammar and style checking now. It is no longer a simple keyword statistic count. You can copy the text from elsewhere and change it so long as its not copyright and that will not affect the result.

Try to put some of your keywords in titles for the content (but they must read well) as H2 and H3 tags. Avoid H1 since it looks awful and Google can penalise you for spamming if you put too much in there! Put some of your keywords in image alt tags, whatever you write try to make it sentences!

Place your useful content high on the page. If you have a warning notice put it at the bottom and hyperlink to it from the top of the page.

AVOID: Wierd punctuation and smileys like :-) since they get marked as ungramattical and in extreme cases will result in your page being only partially indexed. Avoid mis-spellings - funnily enough link text does not seem to get spell checked whereas page content does. So if you have a keyword like 'mygirl' put it inside a text link to somewhere else on your site and not in the main body of your text.

Meta Tags

For Google the only important one is description. It should be a sentence, not too sales orientated, make sense, and if at all possible with no punctuation. Same goes for your page title but whereas you page title should only be 5-10 words tour description should be 25-35 words.

The Linking Trap

If you have links to/from a banner farm or a links dump that just has a huge array of links or banners and no text then get them pulled now! These links will penalise you. I talk to groups of people every day who have had their page ranking dissapear as Google adds another URL to its list of 'bad neighbourhoods' to link to. The best quality links are from within text that is relevant to the keywords that your page is targetting. In addition Google looks for and marks down reciprocal links. So one way links now are the safest bet. This means you should own two seperate domains and link from one whilst recieving an inbound link at the other. Stop using banners. Try a table with a graphic in and some appropriate text. This is why I started PORNavigator (see resources), by using this you get traffic from the network plus at least three one way text relevant links to your site. Doubtless many copies will soon spring up and somebody will start charging for traffic!

Forcing a Re-index

Many people do not realise that when you change a page you can force Google to re-index it more quickly. There are two ways of doing this, the best way is by using Google Sitemaps. Install a sitemap on your site and after it has percolated into Googles system you will find that by changing the 'last modified' tag of a URL and resubmitting the map you can get pages re-indexed in under 24 hours. Re-ranking will take another 7-14 days. Slower is simply resubmitting your page manually to google, this will force a re-crawl within seven days or so. Google crawls your site six monthly, three monthly, monthly, weekly, daily or hourly depending on its ranking and how often the page is seen to change. So if your page is on the Yearly list and you change it dont forget to resubmit or you will be there 4 ever!

Summary

For the moment this is the only good solid advice I can give you. Research your keywords well. Make sure you have a lot of test content with links embedded within it, titles, and bold text. Make sure whatever you do follows good grammatical practice and is relevant...... and wait. Dont even attempt to adjust your page to get better ranking unless its already aged. If your ranking drops like a stone then examine every outgoing and every incoming link. Pull all the ones that come from SEO programs and banner programs that do not have a lot of relevant text.