Quote:
Originally Posted by AdultAudiences
Let me add something to the discussion -- a point that I don't think has been brought up before.
Disclaimer: Before I say anything, I should mention that I'm an adult industry outsider. Yes, I have a lot of adult domains; but they're not developed at this stage. I concentrate on domain names as such. Also, I realize that .XXX has been a controversial and divisive issue; and, although I own about 400 .XXX domains, my job as a domain investor is to take calculated risks -- and not to take sides. .XXX has pros and cons. It can be debated which outweigh which. I just happen to be mentioning a potential benefit. It's up to you to decide how plausible or significant it might be.
Let's leave aside how Search.xxx itself will affect adult website traffic. Think about Google or any generic search engine whose job it is to get relevant results in front of people. Now imagine that you're Google's software engineer, and it's time to tweak the algorithm.
If you were Google, what would you want the Google algorithm do with long-tail search phrases like these:
"porn star salary"
"salary of porno"
"salary for porno"
"salary porn star"
"porn movie salary"
"adult industry salary"
"salary in porno"
"what is salary porn"
"average adult salary"
"adult star salary"
"salary porno"
"salary for adult"
etc. ?
Obviously, Google will recognize that PornStarSalary.com matches with "porn star salary" and so forth for each phrase. But is that the best we can do? Ideally, the search engine would be smart enough to detect that every single one of these long-tail searches is basically the word "salary" plus some wild-card adult terms -- "salary" + {XXX stuff}. That's how we perceive a list like this, right? And we want a search engine to think like us.
Well, if I were Google, I would say to myself, "You know, the .XXX TLD is basically just wild-card, general-purpose adult content. So let's interpret the .XXX TLD as being equal to any {XXX stuff} in the search phrase." And then I'd tweak my algorithm so that the .XXX extension itself is treated as a match for any adult keywords in the search phrase. In other words, a domain like Salary.XXX should match with all of the search phrases above.
I'm NOT saying that this happens currently. I'm just saying that if you or I were updating Google's algorithm, this is what we'd do to make it smarter -- just because it helps Google deliver more relevant content. After all, someone who searches for any of the phrases above would probably be interested in whatever content is on a website called Salary.XXX. Wouldn't you say so?
Personally, I think Google would have to be blind not to do something like this. It just makes sense to interpret the .XXX TLD as representing adult themes. So if I were a gambling man, I'd expect this modification of Google's algorithm to happen in the next year or two.
Would that give .XXX an advantage as a catch-all for unpredictable adult long-tail phrases? It might -- but not always. For example, as far as this goes, I see no advantage to PornVideo.xxx compared to PornVideo.com. Why not? Because the keywords are clearly adult, and the .XXX TLD adds no additional information. But there's a world of difference between Salary.xxx and Salary.com. Google SHOULD distinguish between the two. So Google WILL.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that I do see an advantage for many .XXX domains as a result.
|
The problem isn't really in interpreting a TLD as adult-oriented or not, it is that you can't base a site's categorization on the domain name - and Google doesn't and won't. The domain name is a very small (mostly non-existent) part of the overall relevancy equation that is applied to sites as they are indexed. A search query is compared to a sort of hash of a site's content, generated by Google's algorithms, with the more relevant sites returning higher in the results. Of course, relevancy itself is only part of the big picture - you've still got things like site age, inbound and outbound linking, CTRs, etc. that are all factored in when ranking and indexing sites. This is how sites like WeLiveTogether.com, which superficially has nothing to do with adult content, or Kayak.com which superficially has nothing to do with air travel, can still rank very high in search results in their respective, relevant categories. You could have sex.xxx and if the site is about growing potatoes, Google won't return you as a result for any searches for sex. Or more to the point, you could have Lesbians.xxx and if your site is all midget porn, Google won't return you as a result for any searches for lesbians.
Now without getting into my personal opinion about the .xxx TLD (although I do own a few and a couple hundred more or less mainstream domains), the one advantage that it has relative to search engines is that it frames the crawler's hashing efforts. As GoogleBot, I don't have to wonder if a site like WeLiveTogether.xxx is about a family with several different types of cute and cuddly pets, or a bunch of voyeuristic lesbians. i can instantly switch to my adult site indexing criteria and continue crawling the site thus offering a more confident result. So from a search engine's point of view, the only real differences are efficiency and confidence - neither of which being related to the site's domain name of course. As a site owner, this will not change my ranking relative to other adult sites. What it *could* do is minimize the number of irrelevant false positives when someone searches for a crossover term. This has a net effect of boosting your overall placement, but along with any other relevant sites that you are already competing with anyway.
So, the moral of the story in my opinion is that buying a relevant .xxx will not affect your search engine rankings any more than a comparable .com assuming the content is the same. Obviously from a branding and exposure perspective it is a completely different story.