It comes up regularly on adult webmaster forums in some form: “Google won’t list me. Alexa gives me the lowest possible rank. And whatever I do, nothing works.” Yes, it can give you a headache. But – as the wise monk said: “anger lives only inside your own head”.
Annoying and unfair as it may be, a fact of life is that Google and a whole bunch of other well-respected (wannabee) Wall Street companies simply do not want to be affiliated with the adult industry. Some of their reasons for this attitude are valid: there is too much fraud within the industry, there is a poor general “image” and people are still trying to sell what is apparently and blatantly illegal.
On the other hand, adult related Internet traffic may make up for between 20 to 30 percent of the entire Internet traffic, so it is pretty hard to ignore. And nobody wants to annoy consumers by not giving them what they are looking for. So instead Google and others do both – they will not bother with most of the adult-oriented traffic, but they will give the consumer some bites to eat. The game is called “keeping the customer satisfied (but not bloated)”.
So what do you do?
First this: there is no need to get any (more) grey hairs over this and aggravation is very bad for your blood pressure. Make sure your site is “Google-faehig”, i.e. have good and especially sensible meta tags, make sure there is a robot.txt file and a Google-friendly site map on your site, submit to Google only once and leave it there. If and when the Google bot wants to find you it will.
Secondly, concentrate on others. MSN search and Yahoo can both bring you just as much traffic and both are (at least now) a lot less problematic. Here too however the credo is: make sure your site meets their criteria and submit only once – not every week, every month or whatever.
Next: concentrate your promotional efforts on three other things:
1. get listed in search engines and on directory pages that are adult-friendly. There are many. Individually each will probably bring you five or six hits a day, but remember: not only are these high quality hits, because the surfer took the trouble to actually not use Google and secondly 5 hits from 1.000 “small” referring sites make 5.000 hits per day!
2. exchange links with your fellow webmasters. And if you are an individual webmaster, do not come up with crazy requirements such as ridiculous banners, fancy table-based text links and a “link me first” policy that will only mess up your fellow webmaster’s lay out. We need each other! An old marketing credo: one shoe shop on main street will have a hard time coping – ten shoe shops on main street will all prosper because the consumer has both a reason to go there and has a choice!
3. concentrate on content.
What is content?
What is and is not content is different for surfers and search engines. A surfer is a probably visually oriented human person. A search engine is a computer that only wants easy binary code. In content terms, easy binary code is text.
Back to our old friend Google and the other big search engines. They simply love text content, as long as it is to to the point, factual and relevant to the subject of the site. Having an entirely “visual” set of pages – i.e. image map based lay out as most adult oriented sites have – is great for the surfer but a horror to search robots. Fancy flash lay outs and such are even worse.
And guess what: “old school webmasters” know how to do this. Back in the old days with slow dial up modems picture intensive pages were not exactly user friendly, since these would skyrocket their phone bill big time. So what the old school webmaster did was provide a text version of such pages as a form of service. And that is the trick! If you have a visually oriented lay out, also make a text version of that page. And that is actually quite simple. Just sit down and try to explain in words what a blind man cannot see on your page.
What is very likely going to happen is that Google et al will pick up this text version and list it anyway.
Good, isn’t it?
And there is another thing. Suppose your adult oriented site is about “spanking”. What you do is write a “spanking FAQ” and place that in the free area of your adult site. This probably is helpful to your visitors anyway and it is an excellent, valid and to the point text page for your site. Exactly the kind of thing Google loves.
Oh and …… FAQ’s or parts of it are excellent posting material for blogs, fora and groups. All these too will bring you both surfers and back links – the other thing that Google loves.
