Guide to the Vocubulary of Linking..
It has been awhile since I have been able to post to this blog as I have been engaged in several acquisitions that needed to be addressed and the sites cleaned up for their transition.
While there are a number of things that I have been intending to extend upon from my earlier posts, I am making this post, in essence, to reply to a series of PM’s on a message board that I have been having over a 2 month period that relates to a simple link exchange and have resulted in a bit of miscommunication. The primary reason for the miscommunication is one of semantics – or, the vocabulary of the industry.
Every industry has its own unique vocabulary and the adult Internet business is no different. In fact, the business of the Internet has a rather broad dictionary of specific terms and the adult industry adds to that with its own set of business specific terms. The exchange of PM’s that I have had relates specifically to the exchanging of links, and the following tutorial is an overview of some of the language used in the online porn business that enables clear communication on the terms of exchanging links and/or traffic….
On a broad level, there are two reasons to cooperate with other webmasters and that is to generate traffic and backlinks and there are five primary types of link/traffic exchanges. Although there are an infinite number of variations of these and a variety of specific SEO linking strategies not covered by the umbrella definitions of these terms, most webmasters never engage in anything beyond the four basic methods of cooperation between webmasters to build backlinks and traffic.
The two primary reasons that webmasters cooperate to “exchange links” or “trade traffic” are:
Backlinks: In essence, “backlinks” means the number of sites/pages on the Internet that are linking to that site/page. Backlinks are an important part of search engine algorithms to determine PR (Google), authority of a site and the trustworthiness of a site. All of these things – PR, authority, and trustworthiness – are important elements in determining your ranking for search engine terms (SERPS).
There are many other variables involved in ranking well for SERPs, but, for purposes of this discussion, we are interested in optimizing our linking strategy to yield valid links from other sites to our site or page. The goal is to achieve as many quality backlinks as possible. In the world of “exchanging links”, Google’s PR is the shorthand that most webmasters use the evaluate the quality of a backlink. While this may be overly narrow, it is the method used by most.
Consequently, the objective is to achieve the highest number of backlinks from relatively high PR sites/pages that you can in order to increase the PR, authority and trust factor of your pages and/or site.
Traffic: A second reason to cooperate with your fellow webmasters on linking is to generate traffic. In essence, you are trading traffic. You are sending traffic from your site to another site with the expectation that an equivalent amount of traffic is sent back to you. Equivalent would be defined as a function of quantity and quality.
The most common methods of achieving these two objectives – gaining backlinks and traffic – are not mutually exclusive. In the adult webmaster community, however, they are almost always – particularly amongst beginning to modrately advanced webmasters – talked about in a mutually exclusive way. Following is the terminology most often used in the industry when webmasters are making deals on backlinks or traffic.
Link Exchange: The objective of a “link exchange” is to generate backlinks, with any traffic that is residual from that being a bonus consequence. The most common and straightforward “link exchange” is what is called an AB exchange where one webmaster places a link from their site (A) to another webmasters site (B) and the other webmaster places a links from their site (B) to the first webmasters’ site (A). This is most often a “root index” exchange where “root index” is defined as your default page that appears when you type in your domain name (i.e. http://www.domain.com/). The parameters of a deal between webmasters agreeing to a link exchange are very domain and page specific in both directions and the specific url being used for the link and the anchor text of the link.
When exchanging links, you will often hear about ABC and ABCD link exchanges. I will make a subsequent post about the advantages and disadvantages of these more advanced strategies as well as talk about what they mean. For the purposes of this discussion, however, assume that a “link exchange” is a simple cooperative linking between the root indexes of two sites.
Deep Link Exchanges: Similar to ABC and ABCD link exchanges, these are more advanced strategies. It involves linking to and from pages that are not a root index page. Because they are called “exchanges”, their primary objective is the backlink with direct traffic being a secondary consideration. I will also discuss these in a subsequent post. As in exchanges between root indexes of sites, the agreement between webmasters really boils down to the specific pages on which links are being exchanged, including the target pages and anchor text.
Traffic Trades: Traffic trades are actions where two webmasters cooperate to “trade” traffic directly. These are most often done via a script on both sites that track the trade between the sites. The most common form of traffic trades are those done on tgps’ or a link list via either a top list or a skim of galleries/links using the script. Often times, a combination of a toplist and a “skim” are used.
Plugs: As Deep Link Exchanges are a more advanced method of link exchanging, Plugs are normally a more advanced form of “traffic trading”. Although blog plugs are sometimes used to exchange deep links, they are most often discussed in context of an explicit traffic trade. Used mostly by scripted blogs, babelogs, dumps and tubes, plugs mean that I will put your blog post or video post in my site’s new post area giving you traffic and you will do the same for me. The traffic from these plugs are tracked by a script with the expectation that it will be returned.
As I mentioned above, there are an infinite variety of methods of cooperation between webmasters. The above, however, covers the most common that a new webmaster will encounter. In fact, they are the only situations that most webmasters deal with everyday.
Confusion often develops between full-time webmasters and those just beginning because of the perceived interchangeability of the terms “exchange” and “trade”. For professional adult webmasters, they are not interchangeable. An exchange is one where the link is the value and a trade is a transaction where the traffic is most valued. For link exchanges, the secondary confusion that newer webmasters encounter is the specificity of the pages on which links are “exchanged”. Because of the sensitivity of the relevance of the link to search engines, the specification of the pages involved in a link exchange is very specific.
Confusing a link page exchange (a version of deep linking), for example, with root index exchanges will always frustrate the experienced webmaster. While it may appear confusing, understanding the transactional terminology of building traffic and/or backlinks is critical to effectively communicating with the overall webmaster community – not just adult webmasters.
