What are Best Practices for Ault Site SEO

[macs22]

Has anyone here had experience doing SEO for an Adult DVD website?  A company has approached me and they obviously only want White Hat practices.  I have used open site explorer to do research on some competitors.

The top competitors of this company seem to have only a few high PR links from High Authority industry sites and almost all have a link from the Yahoo Directory.

Does anyone know where or how to create high authority content links from this niche?  It seems that most of the competitor links are on sub par pages and are single links in the side nav of other sites.

I am not sure if I can post a link to the company here but any suggestions on link building for adult sites would be great.  Please remember they are a retailer and don't have pop up advertising or any illegal content.

Thanks,

[macs22]

Please note, that I know most of the community here does not work on sites like these.  I am just wondering where a site like Adult Avenue is supposed to gain Authority links and as an industry as a whole.  It appears that most web masters create fake adult star websites to link back to their own.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Matt Cutts says adult sites are hard because no one wants to link to them. Most of the time, this is true.

If it were me, I'd try to create "safe" non-adult assets (like a blog, charts, infographics, biographies, studies, interesting articles) etc that you can show to the rest of the world, and get links to those safe assets.

You could put assets on another section of your site (best) or a subdomain (second-best) or even another site (okay) and link back to your "money-shot" assets.

These are called "bank-shot" links, and if you work this way, the world is wide open. You can choose any white-hat method you like. Here's a list of my favorite resources: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

[macs22]

Thank you for your response.  A strange thing happened after I made this post.  The rankings for this site dropped dramatically.  Would the link posted in this Q&A affect the site rankings?  There was an SEO person working on this site prior to me and he had a few links from low end article submissions, and social bookmarks.  However most of the inbound links came from relative adult sites.  We were ranked in the top ten for some prominent keywords.  After this post however, all rankings have dropped to the third page or lower, while competitors with worse link profiles were bumped up.  I am really confused as I have got links from the same sites as competitors yet it seems we were punished somehow.

Please help.  Does anyone have any ideas as to why this would happen?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Sorry to hear your rankings dropped. If anything, a link from here would likely help.

Google released 2 known algorithm updates in May that targeted low quality backlinks, so there's a possibility you were caught up in these.

If you're confused about your links, you can research them one of two ways, with either automatic tools or manual analysis. Realistically, you should use both. A good Manual Analysis Resource:

• Easy Step by Step Guide to Finding Low Quality Links

And some good automated tools:

• Link Detox
• Remove’em
• SEOgadgets Link API Extension for Excel.

It's hard when you're competitors are building similar links. Unfortuneatly we don't always know why Google targets some links and not others. The truth is you know you have low quality links, you know your rankings went down, and probably the only thing to do about it is try to clean them up, disavow as a last resort, and file a reconsideration request.

I've got some tips in this post here: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

[jesse-landry]

Cyrus has you covered here. I'd say you got Penguined and the fact that it coincided with your posting here was coincidental at best.

Just to further clarify, posting links on the moz q forum does nothing as they are all automatically given a nofollow tag.

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Contact that SEO who did the poor quality link building and see if you can get login names and passwords to remove those articles.