One of the consequences of building an empire is the inevitable accumulation of domains that one does not put to use.  I now have close to 300 domains that I am not using and have decided to part with some of them.  Following is a list of those domains and some key variables that I use to value them.

All of the following domains are for sale at Snap Names.  Snap Names is an auction platform for aftermarket and expired domains run by Oversee.net which also runs the award winning domain registration service called Moniker (and I will write more about that later).  You need to register with Snap Names, but the registration is free.  To bid on the domains once registered, just search the domain name and click on the button that shows the domain is in auction or is available.

Anyway, here we go with my first effort to clear out some domains that I have been holding for some time.  All are registered at Moniker.  If you win the auction, Snap Names will automatically create a Moniker account for you should you not already have one..

Click for the rest of the post to see the domain information:

Following is the listing of available adult domains:

Domain:  5star-babes.com

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Traffic: Negligible

Exact term monthly Google searches:  1,600

Related Searches:  Millions of searches for babe related words

Reserve Price: $59

Domain: amateurfucksluts.com

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Traffic:  About 25 uniques per month

Exact term monthly Google searches: 100

Related Searches:  Three of the most searched terms on the net

Reserve Price:  $59

Domain:  babeshrine.com

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Traffic: About 30 uniques per month

Exact term monthly Google searches:  Approximately 100

Related Monthly Searches:  Babe related terms are amongst the most searched terms on the net

Reserve Price:  $49

Domain:  boobs-videos.com

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Traffic:  10 uniques per month

Exact term monthly Google searches:  210,000

Singular Form Searches (boobs video): 450,000

Significant related long-tail search results with both words in string

Reserve Price:  $59

Domain:  eroticfetishsites.com

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Traffic:  Estimated 30 uniques per month

Domain Use:  Great fetish directory domain

Reserve Price:  $69

Domain; findlocalpussy.com

Age:  Approximatelyy 1 year

Traffic:  negligible

Domain Use:  Great sex dating domain

Reserve Price:  $49

Domain:  fingeringfemmes.com

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Traffic:  negligible

Domain Use:  Great female masturbation site

Reserve Price:  $49

Domain:  glamourboobs.com

Age: Approximately 1 year

Traffic:  15 uniques per month

Direct term Google searches: 1,600 per month

Reserve Price:  $49

Domain:  lesbiancurious.com

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Exact term monthly Google searches:  1,600

Reserve Price:  $59

Domain:  naturaltitgalleries.com

Great long tail keyword domain

Age:  Recently dropped and re-registered

Reserve Price:  $69

Domain:  nudeass.net

Exact term monthly Google searches:  135,000

Hundreds of thousands of term results with both words in them

Age:  Recently re-registered after drop

Reserve Price:  $59

Domain:  nudeerotica.net

Exact term monthly Google Searches:  9,900

Many related term searches

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Reserve Price:  $79

Domain:  realitynudes.com

Exact term monthly Google searches:  1,600

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Reserve Price:  $59

Domain:  realsexdating.net

Exact term monthly Google searches:  500

Great sex dating domain

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Reserve Price:  $79

Domain:  seennude.com

Exact term monthly Google searches:  8,100

Great amateur or celebrity domain name

Age:  Recently registered

Reserve Price:  $79

Domain:  titfanatic.com

Great boob fan domain, short and memorable

Age:  Approximately 1 year

Reserve Price:  $49

All domains are listed in Snap Names auctions and will not be sold unless the reserve is met – or I change my mind later…:)

All of the auctions expire on either the 16th or 17th of December.

I have quite a few premium domain names I am also considering selling once the new year arrives.

Cheers.

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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.

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Adult blogs, being commercial in nature, often times make use of sponsor provided RSS feeds.  In order to import feeds into your blog, you will need a plugin to accomplish this task.  In our experience, there are two reliable, maintained and updated plugins which you can use to import rss feed into your blog or splog as blogs composed entirely of rss feeds are called.

The one that we like the best is called WP-O-Matic.  There are several advantages to this feed plugin.  Primarily, it allows one to customize the layout of incoming feed posts and morph (changing some text on the incoming feed to avoid duplicate content penalties from Search Engines) automatically.  We also find it to be somewhat more customizable in several areas and more stable. 

WP-O-Matic has one downside, however, from our point of view and that is it requires the use of Firefox or Safari as your browser within Wordpress and extends that requirement to several other Word Press functions.  We find that to be a downside because, as professional webmasters, we default to IE because, very simply, that is what most of our surfers use.   Regardless, if we are running a pure splog, we will use this plugin as it gives us more customization in order to avoid looking like every other blog out there with the same feeds.

The other feed importer that we use, primarily on our blogs that supplement original content with feeds, is Free Word Press.  This is also a good plugin and almost comparable with WP-O-Matic.  We simply use it because when updating a regular blog with rss feed supplementary content, we always like to default to how the post looks in IE first.

Documentation for both of these plugins are provided on the links provided.  As we have time, we will publish some additional tricks we have learned about using these two valuable plugins for adult blogs using Word Press.

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I am generally not willing to commit significant time to a publishing property of any kind where I do not control every aspect of that property – meaning primarily the domain name and where it is hosted.  There is simply no reason to build significant value in terms of traffic and/or PR/Trust value in a property that belongs to someone else.  From some points of view, that may mean that my simple criteria as stated would eliminate the use of the free hosting platform for any kind of web promotion.  That, however, would be an oversimplification.

After thinking through the issue thoroughly, I have concluded that there are several good uses for the free hosted blogging platform that do not require a significant time or financial investment and can help build on your primary efforts to build traffic and trust in your own properties….

As any good logical diagnosis begins, however, let me emphatically state the things I would not use the free hosted blog platform for:

 Building a Destination Blog- If you wish to spend your time building your core site or blog to which people will bookmark, you are much better off investing that amount of time in a domain that you own, at your own hosting service, and gaining the future return yourself.  While many people might think that free hosting services minimize their start-up costs, it is actually more expensive to put your time and effort to the benefit of someone else.  Consider that you are adding to the value of their domain name more than any amount you can earn from your sponsors and putting substantial effort into building a destination blog on a free blog hosting service is somewhat akin to servitude.  Since you can get started with your own domain and hosting for as little as about $25.00 US, the return on our time is astronomical from doing it that way.   If you cannot pony up the $25.00 to start a business, get a job at a fast food restaurant and spend the first $25.00 of your paycheck doing so.

Building Core Traffic- Again, why would you put most of your effort into an enterprise that the foundation of which could disappear tomorrow, someone else could shut down the service and take your hardwork and earn from it, or that you cannot legitimately sell.  Put it this way, had you invested a year into building a PR 1 free hosted blog and you no longer have time to maintain it, what can you sell it for?  If you guessed $0, you would be correct.  If you had invested the incremental $25.00 in doing it the right way, and another $40 from hosting it the rest of the year, that PR 1 domain would be worth a minimum of $150, and potentially alot more.  Any sane businessperson would opt for spending the $50 to $65. 

Traffic Feeder Blog - Again, building traffic takes time.  Why spend that time on a domain that could disappear tomorrow and you cannot transfer those efforts?  The whole conversation about feeder blogs or sites vs. other sites is a bit nonsensical.  Traffic is traffic and a feeder that gets traffic somehow is not a feeder as it becomes a destination.  If you think about it logically, there is not real definition for a “feeder blog”.  Now, a feeder site, because it is static and can collect some hits and send them along, is a legitimate site.  But a feeder blog?  Since blogs take longer to build and develop than a collection of static html pages, I see no sense in developing something popularly known as a feeder blog at all.

Having eliminated those avenues for putting to use the offer of free hosting, the following are simply suggested uses of the platform for intelligent returns on your investment (some of which I have started to deploy):

 Back Link Building:  If we assume that all we want the blog to accomplish is get indexed by major search engines and provide legitimate “distant” back links, setting up a backlink blog on a free host is legitimate.  It certainly takes more time than setting up a simple html site, but the advantages the blog format gives you in quick indexing make up for that disadvantage.  Furthermore, using free blog services allow you to put up multiple, rss fed blogs across quite a number of C-class ips (the distance factor) and for those blogs (and their links) to get indexed quick.  Using syndicated sponsor feeds minimize the set-up and daily work.  And, you are really not trying to build traffic for the site to be a feeder; you just want the indexed backlink.  Be careful, however, to not create the appearance of a network when building blogs for backlink value only.  That will be identified by the search engines and could get every site on your network banned.

Specific Site Reference Blogs:  I have a bunch of sponsors offering quality, morphed feeds but not the blog itself to be promoted.  I use the feeds to build blogs and promote in plugs and specific static html sites to drive business to a particular sponsor site.  Again, I could care less about the organic or link exchange traffic; these blogs are part of my promotional network I send surfers through.  And, managing your surfer network and where they go is part of the talent any successful commercial web enterprise needs to develop.

Quicke Site Reviews:  Site reviews convert at a rate of about 50% better than other sites.  Developing a set of site reviews, morphing them a bit, and publishing them on a wide swath of free blog hosting services is an efficient use of time as long as you are finding some way to use them to force your exit traffic to.  Furthermore, they can double as backlink blogs should they become indexed.

Now that we have identified some potentially valuable uses for a free hosted blog platform, the next issue is choosing the free blog hosts to use.  My criteria is as follows:

 Current indexed listings of blogs in major search engines:  Are there blogs on the network that have a PR value of more than 0?  If not, the network is either new or has been penalized by the search engines.  Check blogs on the network as this is critical.  If the network is more than a couple of months old and you have difficulty finding indexed blogs, this is a potential problem.  I could list all of the things that some of the services do to get penalized and, therefore, make it difficult for subdomains to acquire listings, but simply make sure that something is getting listed from the domain.

Reasonable Ad Space:  The standard has been set by Twan’s Thumblogger program, and that is at most a small and unobtrusive single bar for advertising.  Services that offer something similar or less are competitive.  Those that require more advertising space are, therefore, less competitive offerings.

Non-intrusive 404 Redirection:  Some of the services have invasive and obnoxious 404 redirections.  If they do, your trust level will drop with both SE’s and any surfers you acquire – blogging programs create more 404 issues than any other web publishing platform, and this will be an issue if the program operator is aggressive in the treatment of 404 errors.  On the other hand, 404 redirection is a source of income that provides the ability to free host your blog.  If the service has no 404 redirection and limited advertising, that concurrence leads to several other questions pertaining to either their survivability or their intention of providing the free service in the first place (domainers will develop a domain until it has page rank, dump the content and sell the PR ranked domain, for example)

Attractive Templates:  Some services only offer a couple of very unattractive templates.  While I don’t recommend using free adult blog hosts to develop destination sites, an attractive site will make it more likely you surfer will stay on the site and click a link or three. 

Free Image Storage:  The only reason to use free blog hosts are their efficiency of building backlink and promotional vehicles quickly and inexpensively.  If the service does not offer image storage or disk space, you need to find another source to provide this service which the cost and/or time to execute a viable strategy using free blog hosts.

Your Site Must be on a Subdomain:  There are several services offering free hosting as a folder of the primary domain (i.e. xxxxx.com/folder).  You need to only use services that allow you to use a subdomain (xxxxx.xxxxxx.com).  Folders are more than twice as difficult to get recognized by the search engine’s initially.  Remember, we are after speed and efficiency.

With that criteria in mind, these are the free hosted blog services that I have found that seem to meet them – I will indicate the ones I currently use (all the links open in a new window/tab):

Thumblogger:  The longest running free blog host with the most committed operator gives you the advantage of being able to forecast that they will be in business for the next year with a fairly high degree of probability.  Also, this service is one of the more well developed of the available options.  RSS Syndication available.

Sensual Writer:  Run by the same people who run Thumblogger, but, as opposed to that service, runs from a Wordpress platform.  Personally, I have had problems getting syndication to work well with the service, but many people are sucessful with it.

Smut.com:  I have more blogs on smut.com than any other service.  It uses a Wordpress platform and I find that my new blogs get indexed fast.  They also offer 100 mb of storage with every blog, and I consider that a big advantage.  RSS Syndication Available.

Pornblink:  I just started using this service, but their services seem similar to Smut.com.  Please note that you cannot use RSS feeds on this service as they do not have a syndication plug-in on their Wordpress.mu platform.

Blogtur:  Both adult and mainstream blogs are hosted here.  I have not tested the service but it seems to meet all of the criteria that I established.

My Porn Blogger:  Another service that I have not tested, but, according to their splash page, offers the features that I would look for in a free adult blog host.

Pornblogz:  This service seems similar to smut.com and has made my list to test.

Seductive Blogs:  Another seemingly good platform, it is on my list to add a couple of blogs with.  They also, however, do not have a syndicatio plugin.

Triplexblog:  A promising new service that was just introduced.  The operator seems interested in offering a state of the art free adult blog host.

There are some other interesting services out there that I find attractive but have some questions about before I will either try or recommend:

3blogger: This service meets all of the criteria yet requires not advertising.  As far as I can tell, they also have no advertising on their 404 redirection page.  On the surface, this appears to be a very attractive alternative.  The problem is that there is no obvious method they are using to monetize this service in order to at least pay for bandwidth.  It is something that I intend to ask the operator about and will post an update when I get an answer.

BDSMLog:  Appears to meet all of the criteria except I cannot determine whether they provide any disk storage.  At some point I will follow up and update their offerings.

BlogSexy:  Owned by the same operator as BDSMLog with the same question.

ErosBlog:  Same issue as BDSMLog and BlogSexy

XLogz:  Same issue as 3blogger.

The following services are those that I would give a try as additions to the most recommended services, but they fall somewhat short in an area or two:

Blogbugs:  Three lines of ad links on the top bar.  A few too many for my taste. 

Easy Porn Blog:  Two lines of multiple ad links on top; again, a few too many compared to other offerings.

iBlog Adult:  Two lines of multiple ad links on top; again, a few too many compared to other offerings.

MySexyLog:  They seem to meet all of the criteria except they appear to offer limited, rather boring, templates.  While not a critical criteria for our purposes, it is nevertheless nice to present visitors with an attractive site.

Pornlivenews: They seem to offer only one template and their ads are a bit prominent for my taste.  Like the services listed above, it remains an adequate service for the purposes that we would use them for.

One final note as an additional warning about the dangers of using free adult blog hosts, the following services that were online as little as one month ago were offline when I checked them to compose this post (they may very well return, but were offline when I checked):

Adult Blog Press:  adultblogpress.com

Pimpsblogger.com

I know there are other services out there.  Some have been omitted simply because my belief that it is better to identify the positives and, as a consequence, the services I find useful.  Of course, there are services about which I am yet aware. 

Suffice it to say, the services I recommend come with my intitial caveats about using free hosting services – they can disappear or change their policies at any time.  Other than that, the services I recommend are those that I think it is worth investing a small chunk of your time in the suggested areas of promotional activity.

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If you do not know what a “ping” is, click here for the Wikpedia article on “pinging”.

If you do know what pining is and are somehow fearful of pinging your adult blog as you update, it is time to put that notion to rest.

First of all, pinging is an intentional service intended to allow Search Engines to access and provide results for fresh content that is published in the blog format.  It is specific to “blogs” because of their decidedly “news” and “opinion” orientation and bias in format of the publishing mechanism.

If you doubt that it is the intention of blog pinging services to wish to be let known of blog updates, following is a quote from the Google page introducing their blog pinging service:

“Today we’re launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes. Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in our Blog Search index can now ping us directly. We’ll continue to monitor other pinging services and will contribute change notifications to the community. Read more at our FAQ. “ 

This was published on this Google page in 2006.

Furthermore, pinging allows your new site to be indexed faster (I have put some blogs up on new domains that went from grey bar to a PR 0 in a matter of hours).  It will also bring fresh traffic to new posts. 

But, all webmasters, particularly adult webmasters, need to be concerned about being identified as a “ping spammer”.  Because there should be concern, however, does not mean or imply that one should not ping their updates…

Ping spam is something that every blog, adult or not, should be aware of.  In essence, ping spam is the attempt to ping pages or content that is neither fresh or recent.  In other words, pinging old pages/posts withing your blog or repeatedly pinging the same content.  This could get your blog identified and penalized as a ping spammer.

Adult blogs need to be particularly cognizant of this particular issue.  We all know that by the nature of their keywords, adult sites in general are more carefully parsed in the search engine algorithms because they are all by default labeled as potentially “members of a bad neighborhood” to use Google’s own terms.  None of that means, however, that adult blogs should be any more fearful of pinging their new posts and pages than any mainstream blogger.

What it does mean, from the very initiation of your blog, that you need to be more careful about pinging existing pages or stale content.  In fact, by the very nature of their offering the service in the first place, the search engines want you to ping them.

So, what do I mean by being careful to avoid “ping spam”?

Generally, you need to follow some basic and commonsensical guidelines:

• Do not ping when you are setting up your blog other than the initial ping when you bring the software (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) live.
• Do not ping older content, particularly if it has already been pinged.
• Do not ping back posts.  Doing back posts is fine if you are simply trying to add content for your users.  Do not risk pinging such content as the search engine will wonder which existing page it came from and may conclude you are pinging duplicate content.  If you are transfering older posts from a different platform (Drupal to Wordpress for example) and need to tell the search engines the new url, use redirection codes (we recommend only using .htaccess 301 redirection for this purpose).
• Do not allow your posts to be pinged when you are editing them.  Wordpress, by default, will ping the services each time you edit a post.
• Make sure your future posts are getting pinged when published.  Wordpress and other platforms do not necessarily do this.  In other words, if you make posts to be published in the future by changing the time-stamp, make certain they are pinged when actually published and only when actually published.

So, now that the rules are established, how do you accomplish this?

I am going to answer this starting from you initiation of your new blog on a new domain and assume you are using Wordpress.  If you are using another blogging platform, do the same things in the areas that allow you to accomplish the same things:

1. First, upon logging into Wordpress the first time, and changing your other settings and passwords to your normal settings, go to Settings >> Writing  and delete the update services until you have a change to get your blog up and operating and publishable.

2. Second, install the Ultimate Updates Smart Pinger.  If you have followed the guidelines I published in Essential Plugins for Adult Blogs, you would already have installed this handy plugin.  If, however, you have not, do so immediately.

3. Once you have installed and activated the Smart Pinger Plugin, go to Settings >> UP Smart Pinger.  You will see a page like the following…

Once you are on this page, there are only a couple of things you must intially do.  Until your blog pages and theme are ready to begin publishing, leave the checkbox to enable pinging unchecked (you will check it when you are ready to publish). 

You also should have received a list of pinging services in the folder from your download named update-services.txt.  Copy the update services from this text file and paste into the text box on the Smart Pinger Page.  Do not about the update services box on the default Wordpress page to list update services.  The Smart Pinger will override that setting – which you have left blank.

Pre-Publication Settings for Smart Pinger

 4. Now, you are ready to configure your theme, test posts, and test css styles on your theme without pinging anyone. 

5. Prepare your first page (s) and post (s) and save in draft form. 

6. If you are backdating some posts or transferring posts over from another platform that will now have a new url, publish them now.  This is very important to avoid any sort of spam labeling.  Again, for posts that have moved or have a new url, prepare an .htaccess 301 redirection and upload it to your root.

7. Once you have your new blog site configured and ready to go and have prepared your first page (s) and posts but prior to publishing anything, go back to the Ultimate Plugins Smart Pinger configuration page Settings >> UP Smart Pinger.  Put a check in the tick box labeled “Enable Pinging”, save changes, and now you are ready to publish.

Enable Smart Pinger

8. Publish your new pages and posts.  If this is a brand spanking new blog, this is all you need to do.

Assuming you make no additional changes to your blog’s theme or css, that is all you need to worry about.  The Smart Pinger Plug in will do the following: 

1. Ping services only when a new post is created, not when a post is updated
2. Ping services for future posts only when the post appears on your blog
3. Provide you with a detailed overview of each ping operation the plugin makes
4. Provide you with a “ping now” functionality
5. Check if a service supports extended or normal pings and ping accordingly
6. Use the new URL instead of just the homepage URL to ping, resulting in a much higher quality ping (extended pings) 

In other words, each time you make a new post or add a new page, the plugin will ping services that notify all of the major search engines and blog directories of your update.  If you have used their list of ping services, you will not be duplicating pings, pinging duplicate content, generating redundant pings or any other spam type of pinging. 

You will, however, get all the benefit from pinging that everyone in the mainstream does without being labeled a spammer.

As a side note to non-Wordpress users, you need to make sure to enable your blog platform to do the following things:

1.  Do not allow your platform to ping on edits, back dated content or duplicate content.

2.  Make sure that the platform blogs your future posts when they are published.

3. Make certain you are not pining posts as you edit them.

You can handle these tasks manually by turning off the pinging feature of you platform and then pinging only the following services each time you update so as not to ping the same service multiple times (List effective as of 03/18/09): 

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

The reason you restrict your list to these services is that some of them, most famously pingomatic, already ping other services such as Google.  Multiple pinging of the same content will get you banned.  To be safe, ping only the url of the new post/page although mainstream folks will ping the main page of their blog and the post/page url.  Only ping new content.

One final note is that we highly recommend that you also use this plugin with the All in One SEO plugin for Wordpress.

So, ping away without fear sisters and brothers.  There is no reason you should not benefit from this service without being banned or penalized by any search service.

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As with any new program I use for website monetization, it takes some time to learn how to use.  I use it primarily for some domains I have parked and some splogs that are used for linking purposes.  None of these sites individually has much traffic.

For the first time, I began using the Black Label banner ads.  Something that was not clear to me in the configuration process that I have since learned is a valuable piece of knowledge for those using their service for parked or inactive domains…

In essence, black label pays on a per click basis for their text only ads.  If you use their banner option, they claim that your payouts will be higher.  This may be true for higher volume sites, but I am at a loss to figure out how one could not monetize their traffic better than with a general banner ad on their site.

Regardless, I tried their banner option on a few parked sites.  It soon became clear that their banner ads pay a fee based on impressions or clicks and they serve the differing options randomly.  The text only ads, however, pay on a per click basis.  The per click payouts, also, are accumulated across all of your sites.  The banner impressions are calculated on a per domain, or per zone, basis. 

If you are using the service to build a site in substitution for parking it at some place like Sedo, this is an important differentiation as it may take an exceptionally long time to monetize a CPM banner per zone versus per click across all of your zones. 

So, beware of just putting the blacklabelads.com banner ads on your lower traffic and parked domains.  The service is quite valuable and a nice adult substitution for Google AdWords, but be aware of the differences.

If you have not checked out Black Labe Ads website monetization tools for the adult market, click here to do so.  You may find that they have some tools that you can scrape out that incremental revenue that is all important in these tough times.

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Another project I have been working on is adding webmaster information pages to each of my blogs.  In the course of doing that, I came across a handy little plugin for Wordpress that is very useful to adult webmaters…..

One of the challenges I was faced with when adding a webmaster information page to each blog was that I did not want that page to appear in the main page menu of the blog.  There were a couple of methods I had conceived of to avoid this consequence that is built into the wordpress core and into most themes:

1.  Add a static html page to the domain, upload it to the server, and link to it from the front page of the blog.

2. If the theme does not have drop down menu functionality and/or child page functionality (or I disable them in the theme .php templates), I can add the page as a child and put up a link on the main page where I want and viola.  I have a webmaster page that is not linked in the blog menu.

Both of these methods seemed to me to be work arounds and not incredibly elegant.  I then came upon a little plugin called the page link manager plugin that allows you to determine which page (s) will appear in the menu and which will not.  Finally, an elegant solution that allows me to build my webmaster information page for the blog in the Pages section of wordpress, publish it by pushing a button, and not have it appear on the menu for the blog.

The plugin is available here:  Page Link Manger Plugin

Install it just like you do any other plug in, go to the tools section, click on Page Links and you will be presented with a simple window.  Just check on the pages you wish to appear in your menu and leave the ones you do not uncheked.  Click on “Save” and you are done.

Simple, elegant and useful to adult webmasters as it provides you (or them) no value to visit your webmaster information page.

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This issue is current in my mind, ironically, because  of work I was doing today to set up a mainstream blog.  Mainstream blogs require a bit more robust use of plug-ins because they are decidedly more Web 2.0 in nature, more interactive, and the commercial veneer is much slimmer.  Not to mention that the Search Engines view of porn and adult sites in general leads to a stricter spam filtering for any domain containing an adult theme.

An adult blog, therefore, will typically use fewer plug ins, but the ones you use are far more critical.

So, I will start with the five Wordpress Plug-ins that any adult market blog should have – in order of importance in my experience:

1. Wordpress Database Backup:  This should be self explanatory.  A blog is a work developed over time, and it gains value with age.  You will spend a cumulatively large amount of hours and work that is put into your work and that work accumulates value with listing in the search engines.  Should your database crash or server go down, all of those placements and that work is potentially lost.  This plugin is simple to install, simple to configure, and is an absolute must for any blog.
2. All In One SEO Plugin:  This plug in helps you to optimize your blog for search engines.  Since the primary benefit of blogging is search engine traffic, I list this plug-in second on my list.  Another reason for it being ranked so highly in terms of requirements for the adult blogger is that, properly configured, the plugin will prevent your blog from creating excessive duplicate content, and, because adult related domains tend to have more spammy and commercial content, avoiding duplicate content is absolutely critical to the sucess of a porn blog in terms of your search engine performance.
3. Ultimate Plugins Smart Pinger:  Pinging is one of the great values that blogs provide.  When I put up a static HTML site, I need some inbound links and time to become indexed by a search engine.  Pinging often results in being visited and idexed relative rapidly (A mainstream blog I brought on line was indexed within 6 hours recently).  The downside, again, is that spammers abuse this service and overping.  What most people do not realize is that they inadvertantly ping the search engines and ping services each time they edit a post or page in the default wordpress installation.  This could get you banned by pinging services.  Implementation of this handy plugin will ensure that your blog pings only when you add a new page or post, not when you edit it.  Again, adult domains are under heavier scrutiny for this practice making this plugin a must have.
4. No Follow Links:  People do not often realize that they get turned down for link exchanges because they have excessive links on their website.  This is because your site can be penalized as a link farm should it have too many outbound links.  Not only does the site in question get penalized, but so do all sites linking to it.  Again, adult sites are relatively more vulnerable to this because of their high number of outbound links to sponsors.  This handy plugin will allow you to link to sponsor blogs and websites without having the link count in your outbound link total from the viewpoint of search engines.  Also, it will pass on more value to your link partners by not splitting the votes of a link with your sponsors.  Warning:  Do not put the nofollow code on your link partners links – it will get you banned by anyone linking to you.
5. WP Affiliate:  This handy little plugin accomplishes two things for your blog.  It masks your affiliate code to your affiliate links in posts and pages and it essentially makes them a “nofollow” link.  These two things improve click through on your affiliate links and protects your blog from getting link farm penalties because these links are looked at as “nofollow” internal links.

Now for a couple of notes and qualifications regarding this very narrow list of essential plugins.

Some people recommend the Platinum SEO plugin over the All in One Plugin.  I find the All in One Plugin to be easier to use, more intuitive regarding its structure and search engine preferences, and also for the fact it has been around for awhile and has a history of regular updates.  That latter point is critical from and SEO standpoint as the rules and algorithms of search engines are constantly changing.  You may want to try both, however, as the Platinum plugin is a very good solution as well.

I also want to emphasize that the above 5 selections are used on every adult blog we introduce.  Our mainstream blogs have a list of 8 that we use on every one.  The adult market, and the commercial nature of the blogs, however, change both the requirements of plugins and the breadth that are necessary.  Regardless, I would never bring a blog live without these plugins installed in an adult blog as their use from the absolute initiation of your blog can save you money and search engine heartache later on in its development.

Please note that comments on this blog are open, and we welcome them.  We do, however, scan them with Askimet.

And, we hope the above is helpful to you.

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You will note that we have linked to a couple of services on the right panel.  All three of these initial services – Sedo Domain Parking and Marketplace,  Hostgator,  and Liquidweb – are people that we do business with and are familiar with their operations.  We will only link to services with an affiliate code that we do business with or are intimately familiar with their operations and have confidence in our recommendations.

Very simply, we do not want to be responsible for directing you to a service simply because they offer an affiliate program.  You will see from time to time links in our post to services that we are simply aware of and have no specific knowledge of.  We link to these as a source of information and knowledge only, and we will explicity state that in a post.

As for the first three services that we have linked to, we will do a spotlight post on each in the near future to help you understand the reasons for us to recommend these services highly.

Regards

Webmaster

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