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The online adult industry lures many online with promises of easy riches. During the crash one ecommerce pundit pointed to adult sites as sites that could survive. While we know that wasn't true, it's true that the adult industry grew through the down turn and remains to day a major technology driver (so much so that USAToday wrote an article on adult tech recently).

Adult SEO: Don't Pull Up Limp in a Hard Market...

Search optimization of adult sites poses interesting SEO problems - they're often image heavy/text light, the competition is fierce for certain terms, Google seems to impose a PR cap on adult themed sites, and the trust-based network makes link exchanges difficult for newcomers.

A recent thread at SEOChat offers insight into these issues, and presented some interesting solutions to SEOs optimizing sites for practitioners in this specialized industry.

This alleged PR cap interested me - the posters offered largely anecdotal evidence, though "ClickyB" pointed out that "the root pages of the google directory categories all have pr9 except the "Mature" (adult) category, which is hidden on the directory home page and has a pr6." He hasn't seen adult sites with a PR higher than 7.

The same poster also mentioned that getting links within the adult industry is much easier if you're already networked (an obvious observation, but there are apparently many in the adult industry who haven't started any SEO campaigns). Be careful which neighborhoods you're linking into though - be sure first that their country's legal restrictions are equal to or greater than your own.

Some sites also don't have splashpage warnings for underage viewers, another indication that they are unscrupulous and may be a part of a bad link neighborhood. Many adult site/network operators use blacklists to decide who to link to. One poster offered this site as a way of checking out potential link partners: http://bl.usefulscripts.com/blocked/.

Site tours, ClickyB said, must also contain optimized text. Many adult site owners don't realize this.

Directories, as in other industries, give adult sites both excellent links and possibly some traffic. "There are hundreds of good directories offering permanent listings on categorised pages - thus good quality backlinks - in exchange for a decent reciprocal link," said ClickyB.

TGP (thumbnail gallery post) sites, which offer short-term links, are best used for immediate traffic building rather than link building. "LilOptimizer" questioned the viability of running tgp sites, which are often pushed on those wishing to enter the adult website industry. "I was seeing conversion rates of 1:100,000 for thumbnails. I guess if you really hustled, and someone else paid for the bandwith you'd have some sort of chance."

"Ledfish," to counter the assertion that adult webmasters are adept at high risk seo techniques, said, "Most... ...pay so little attention to SEO that they wouldn't know the difference between black-hat and white-hat. The search engines just are not going to provide the high traffic you need to succeed, so most don't waste their time with the effort required to employ black-hat techiques."

One thing to consider if you're optimizing some of your images for a Google image search is that you should put dashes in between the keywords with which you're titling them. Check out How To Optimize Your Images For Image Search for more advice.

Thanks to SEOChat for the SEO for Adult Content Sites thread. Be sure to check it out for the complete discussions.

Garrett French is the editor of iEntry's eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.