Originally Posted by Robbie

They didn't need to have any backlink "efforts".

They have thousands and thousands of small and large tube sites "scraping" their vids.
Wouldn't that constitute linking to them since the vid is hosted on Pornhub's servers?

Also...a few years back, my TGP's had over 1.2 million uniques a day. We did trade links with other tgp's...about a dozen or so. And those were straight reciprocal trades (the kind that seo gurus say are a "no-no")
And yet we ranked high on just about every term we had on the site (it's categorized). Anal, mature, amateur, etc.
I couldn't figure it out. We didn't even TRY to rank. We were around long before Google existed and really could have cared less about them. But yet...we were ranked high for almost every porn term.

My thought was that it was because we were relevant just by sheer numbers of people coming to the site. Of course I can't prove that since Google is so mysterious. But I think that Google just could not ignore us. And my gut feeling is that has happened with Pornhub as well.

When Google sees millions of people going to Pornhub looking at pages that are relevant...then I think that all that backlink and seo mumbo jumbo is secondary to the fact that millions of people see Pornhub as relevant to the subject.

I have no proof of that. Only what we had happening when we were kings of traffic, and that I believe the same thing is happening with Pornhub now.