Google Warns It's About To Go After Porn Tubes

[rawTOP]

Our quality guidelines warn against running a site with thin or scraped content without adding substantial added value to the user. Recently, we've seen this behavior on many video sites, particularly in the adult industry, but also elsewhere. These sites display content provided by an affiliate program – the same content that is available across hundreds or even thousands of other sites.

If your site syndicates content that?s available elsewhere, a good question to ask is: "Does this site provide significant added benefits that would make a user want to visit this site in search results instead of the original source of the content" – If the answer is "No," the site may frustrate searchers and violate our quality guidelines. As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality of our users' search results.

Source

There's a decent discussion of this over at Webmaster World but the gist of that discussion is "how is this different than Panda?" And it's a good point to ask why Panda didn't cover porn sites?

Personally I think when it comes to porn Google's got it a bit tough. When people search for porn the best result is often a video. People don't look at porn for the articles (to change an old phrase). So "thin" content is pretty natural for porn, and I suspect that's why Panda didn't hit tube sites all that hard. But it looks like that's about to change.

Personally it took me a while to stop concentrating on Google when I started my tube site. It didn't really take off until I managed to find other sources of traffic. Honestly, while my blogs have always been dominated by Google traffic, and my tube site now gets Google traffic, Google isn't anywhere near a top traffic source for my tube.

I'm guessing Google is basically saying they're going to start sending more porn traffic to blogs again. That's fine with me. Blog visitors use less bandwidth and tend to buy more than tube visitors. All I care about is that one or the other of my sites still ranks well for terms like [bareback porn].

So if you're a blogger you may start seeing more traffic in the near future. If you're a tube site owner you'll see less, but chances are if you're successful at the tube Google isn't critical to your success. You'll feel it a bit, but you'll be OK.

What is curious is that the announcement seems to say that tubes with non-affiliate content (e.g. full movies) will be fine. Their stuff isn't found on hundreds of other sites. That's a bit disappointing. If the end result of this is that the good, honest guys lose out and the pirates win, that would be really disappointing. Fingers crossed that that doesn't actually happen.

[nickbaer]

My "official" studio sites contain my entire catalog of 500 videos and 400 eBooks that I have produced.

All of my videos and eBooks are on the major VOD platforms, as well as eBook sellers.

I wonder how that plays with Google algorithms.

[YanksTodd]

What is curious is that the announcement seems to say that tubes with non-affiliate content (e.g. full movies) will be fine. Their stuff isn't found on hundreds of other sites. That's a bit disappointing. If the end result of this is that the good, honest guys lose out and the pirates win, that would be really disappointing. Fingers crossed that that doesn't actually happen.

I feel like in general any move to place more emphasis on destination sites helps the good, honest guys in the long run.

[DaveSpeedoEvans]

If that is the way things head no complaints here.

[thepornpup]

RawTop- I'm curious about what kind of sources you get your traffic from- is it mostly the bareback forums?

[jIgG]

actually this goes to all sites and blogs that use sponsor content. And now that Google is using more human reviewers it will be even more difficult to skirt around the algorithm. If you're on page 1 your site is being looked at by at least 6 humans or will be soon

I went trough the reviewer test, other than it being very difficult, it becomes subjective past the top two site ratings which are kind of obvious what sites they should be applied to. Past those, and reviewers have quite a bit of leeway on how they rate a site.

They have 6 people looking at the same site, and if the ratings from all 6 differ they have to come to an agreement before the final site rating is assigned but I would imagine when it comes to porn they aren't going dwell over it that much.

Basically the rules are the brand + it's extension content (video/galleries in the case of sponsors), + social presence. Followed by authority sites. And then everyone else

[rawTOP]

RawTop- I'm curious about what kind of sources you get your traffic from- is it mostly the bareback forums?

One of my sites is THE bareback forum. Google used to be 65+% of my traffic. Now I'm a lot more balanced…

Screen Shot 2014-02-11 at 11.16.04 PM.jpg

Social is growing for me, which makes me happy. And the direct is what I'm most proud of - build something that they want to come back to, over and over again.

That said, Google traffic still makes the most money for me.

[Evil Chris]

There's a decent discussion of this over at Webmaster World but the gist of that discussion is "how is this different than Panda?" And it's a good point to ask why Panda didn't cover porn sites?

Personally I think when it comes to porn Google's got it a bit tough. When people search for porn the best result is often a video. People don't look at porn for the articles (to change an old phrase). So "thin" content is pretty natural for porn, and I suspect that's why Panda didn't hit tube sites all that hard. But it looks like that's about to change.

Personally it took me a while to stop concentrating on Google when I started my tube site. It didn't really take off until I managed to find other sources of traffic. Honestly, while my blogs have always been dominated by Google traffic, and my tube site now gets Google traffic, Google isn't anywhere near a top traffic source for my tube.

I'm guessing Google is basically saying they're going to start sending more porn traffic to blogs again. That's fine with me. Blog visitors use less bandwidth and tend to buy more than tube visitors. All I care about is that one or the other of my sites still ranks well for terms like [bareback porn].

So if you're a blogger you may start seeing more traffic in the near future. If you're a tube site owner you'll see less, but chances are if you're successful at the tube Google isn't critical to your success. You'll feel it a bit, but you'll be OK.

What is curious is that the announcement seems to say that tubes with non-affiliate content (e.g. full movies) will be fine. Their stuff isn't found on hundreds of other sites. That's a bit disappointing. If the end result of this is that the good, honest guys lose out and the pirates win, that would be really disappointing. Fingers crossed that that doesn't actually happen.

Not one mention of RSS feeds, and that is what I believe the "gist" of it is to begin with. Let's face it, 99.99% of RSS feeds are affiliate program driven in the adult space. These are the sites that will likely suffer in the scenario described above. One can only hope that a healthy blend of feeds and original content will skirt any new regs introduced.