Coming in at or near the top in the search engine rankings seems like just what the cyber doctor ordered for any webmaster, adult or otherwise. But people deep in the heart of adult cyberspace say that the high search rank is a mixed blessing.
"It kind of is both a blessing and a curse," says YNOT's new president, Jim Ruga. "You have to have content relative to where you want to rank, but in order to get really high rankings, you also have to have sort of a depth of content that a lot of websites don't really have. And as far as the search engines go, you do have, I think, a responsibility to show content that is actually relevant to what the search is all about.”
In addition to the obligation to search engines to justify high rankings with relevant content is having the ability to handle the higher volume of traffic coming in.
"Achieving high visibility in any marketplace comes with its pro's and con's," says adult Internet veteran Cynthia (Cyndalie) Ashlock, who returned to AdultChamber.com in mid-June to work in SEO, marketing, and sales. "I am reminded of the commercial showing a new Internet business opening and a few guys watching a screen, counting new orders coming; only to have so many orders come in they look at one another with an 'oh, no' expression on their faces."
She will get no argument from at least one adult search engineer—Booble.com mastermind Bob Smart.
"Obviously, we're loaded for bear in terms of bandwidth so you wouldn't want to get a high listing like that and not be able to handle the traffic," Smart says. "We were totally slammed [in the beginning] and we lost money because we couldn't accommodate all those customers. Obviously, today that's not an issue for us anymore."
Ruga sounds the relevancy theme a little more strongly, saying YNOT had always had to keep a strong eye on content relevancy because the search engines learned over time to rank by relevance. Even so, the difficulties linger.
"We definitely cultivate traffic for webmaster-related terms," he says, "and that's really a tough one. Because even six months ago, when we would cultivate that traffic, you would find a lot of items in the results that were very poorly representative of content for terms like, for example, 'adult webmaster.' Now, you go back there and you see content much more representative, but maybe it isn't directly related to those terms."
Ashlock says that getting more worldwide exposure through high search rankings brings an adult Internet business more and more into the public eye and the profitability column—but look out if you can’t afford the bandwidth to handle it.
"A large influx of members can be great for your profit margins," she says, "but imagine what happens when the bandwidth bill arrives before the payout from your billing company. Often webmasters have to shell out cash to float their business until the full profit cycle kicks in after gaining newfound success."
But Ashlock, too, thinks content relevancy is critical. So are keyword choices, she says—especially considering the possibility of eyes watching that an adult webmaster might not care to have watching.
"Choosing keywords carefully or understanding how natural text is indexed and ranked in search engines does help to control your risk levels for all the above instances, especially the government," she says.
"A good guideline is to look to the billing companies for 'bad' keywords," Ashlock continues. "Just as Visa doesn't want to be represented on sites bolstering terms like 'naked lolitas' or 'pedo,' webmasters, just like affiliate programs, should avoid the same types of words that may bring about the government eye."
Ruga, however, doesn't believe the government is crawling the search engines in search of choice prosecution targets, but he too sees keyword care as critical to helping keep a site out of the government's prospectively trolling eyes.
"We've done a little dabbling here and there trying our hand at a few things, and I could see [government snooping] being a curse for a site that does really unique and good content," he says. "Even if they are 2257 compliant, if they're number one for the term 'girls' or 'boys,' obviously that's going to put them in the light of the Department of Justice as regards 2257. They may be 100 percent compliant and it's still a good source of information for the government to start with."
But Ruga also believes the government has become tech-savvy enough in its own right to have its own ways of spidering cyberspace. "They're a little more sophisticated than we think," he says. "They're not just going to go to Google and pull up a site and go to the top ten sites and inspect them. I think they already have a list of sites they're going to inspect without going to Google. Google is not a reliable source of info in terms of if you want to find specific porn rankings. The DOJ realizes [search rank] changes so quickly, fast, fluid, I think they already have their own spiders that index sites they might intend to prosecute."
Smart says a lot more traffic can mean a lot more scrutiny—but a lot more profit, if you're working your site and catching the searches the right way.
"Obviously, we've worked very hard to get the traffic we get and a lot of people have linked to us and we reciprocate and that's the business we're in," he says. "Anybody in the Net today has to be building their search engine awareness. You have to understand how they crawl your site. And that free traffic is where you really make your money. We pay for lots of traffic, but without the free traffic there would be no business."
But if the government isn't watching high search rankings, others with law-related aims in mind just might be—aims like watching for and catching intellectual property theft. Perfect 10, to name one, has fought in the courts to stop intellectual property theft in terms of its images turning up in thumbnails in search results, as well as its allegations of several sites using those images unlawfully.
"Unintended trademark infringement is another issue," Ashlock says. "A sex story with a phrase like 'I was playing Nintendo naked' or 'I love my husband’s 1987 Playboy issues' can result in unintentional rankings that can get you a nice letter from a lawyer. '10 Perfect naked girls' vs. 'naked Perfect 10 girls' can both result in a ranking for Perfect 10, but the intention can be both malicious or innocent. And, either way it can be a hassle for SEOs."
