if you create 10,000 pages about MILF Hardcore that are crap, auto generated and link them together and link them back to your main site about ponies with the anchor text "i love ponies" in the footer... the pony site won't tank. the link network behind it will... making all the irrelevant, inbound links have no benefit to your pony site. its what spam is. its how spammers spam (although over quite simplified). how many links link back to smart thumbs from low quality, auto-generated pages? how many total pages? 500K? 1,000,000? 5,000,000? how many of those sites are also linked together?

i'm not saying that's why btw.. i'm just saying that the common thread is going to most likely be linking relationships between pages and the smart thumbs link "might be" a factor in getting these sites tagged as spam... because its totally irrelevant to anything and their site is not contextually relevant to anything linking to it and because people are throwing up auto-generated sites right and left with free versions. and just because you have a paid version w/o the link doesn't mean you aren't interlinked with these same sites via trades/hard link trades and being treated the same.

a site would survive this if they had quality back links... causing it to be treated differently.

at the end of the day, the common thread is ST it seems. google doesn't manually manipulate results. so there are going to be commonalities between these sites that are causing these. since i have several with ZERO outbound links and with no text and that aren't optimized for ANY phrase, i would say it most likely has nothing to do with over optimization as the 950 penalty does and the greatest common factor is going to be link relationships between sites/pages

anyway... no one is going to agree because that's the nature of people this biz. i don't care other than it's interesting to see and is something that should be understood just for the sake of understanding it. at the end of the day, Google is a math program, executing against algorithms. somehow it tied these sites together and has determined them to be low quality results for their phrases. it might be temporary.. might not be. i would definitely assume that its not. but i would guess that you will also find a pattern among these sites of low PR sites/pages with massive networks of shitty trades to other low PR sites/pages

and to drive home my point once more

this... which looks normal to you guys - http://www.bravoerotica.com/
looks no different than any other spam network to Google, set apart ONLY by its linking relationships to other domains.

100's of outbound links per page
zero unique content
all text/links are site wide and duplicated across every page

that's what i mean when i say that TGP's and link directories are essentially spam networks. i was trying to explain that in the "tubes only suceed because they steal" thread to Robbie who owns grampland.com - attempting to explain to him that his own site is a model that is doomed to fail because ultimately will never be the best result for a phrase other than "links" which is what it is, its a model that can't pass any real PR value to other pages making them important. same for TGP's.. they shouldn't be the best result for anything but "Phrase Pictures" or "Phrase Galleries" - so people shouldn't be surprised to see them start dropping away just as they are and as all the big link list sites are.

google, in most cases stops crawling at 100 links on a page anyway.

that's because of that stupid powered by crap...
I hate that shit on both paid and free scripts of any kind...

LOL!

You guys are so way off.

noticed a bunch of link lists reranking though. not sure what to make of it, just throwing it out there.

Good question. Perhaps that's what caused it...

People should just wait a few days and not panic.. I've got this one site (not ST) that ranks high for a couple terms and every so often google decides to fuck with it for a few days to a week.. Like this week.. Monday the SE raffic dropped to 40% of normal. By wednesday it was at 25% but then yesterday it was back up to about 70% and today looks like it will be at least the same.. So give it a few days..

starting to think about that too, it certainly can't do you any good to have a "powered by" link on any of your sites, other than satisfying the licensing tos, but the same goes for wordpress and even more so wordpress themes,


I'm starting to wonder if the best strategy is to say "FUCKEM" and strip all the designer and powered by backlinks out of the footer of all scripts and designs? :2 cents::helpme

Bump for someone to help a brutha out :)

wow that sucks guys

thing that sucks is even if you don't run a smart thumbs tgp if your top trades were smart thumbs users you will see a huge drop in traffic too..

FUCK! lets just give all SE traffic to tubes and torrents! Way to fucking go google! :321GFY

:1orglaugh :helpme

Commit Sucide - Reincarnate - Start a Tube!

From experience and knowing a decent bit about SEO, here's the problem, and it's probably 99.99% this problem only.

The same way google penalizes for duplicate content, they also have the same power to use on duplicate scripts, however with different algorithms. If wordpress did not have themes, plugins, and all that, they would have been forced to do it anyways. Your out of the box wordpress theme will have a hard time ranking in google.

To speed up the process of duplicate code/script penality, some one has to take that script and abuse google with it. The only way for google to stop this abuser, is to bomb all his sites that use the basis for his operation. His words and content could change, but his code will not change for the most part, which is the finger print google needs to stop the abuser. So everyone else was profiled as abuser too. However, I don't think this is the strong case here, this is merely a duplicate code penalty.

I just did an experiment, searching for site's domain without the .com for every site in my toplist. Here are the results:

36 sites in my toplist, 14 run ST, 22 run other scripts.

For the 22 others, every single one came up as the #1 SERP for their domain name (domain without .com).

For the 14 Smart Thumbs sites, every single one came up on pages 5-8.

my 2c would be it's all the same content coming from the sponsor programs. maybe they are just starting to crack down on duplicate "spam" content

But yet again,there are retards like nation-x and wiliwank which claims how these situation doesn't have any relationship with st

good im so glad this happened more room for me.

I'd say this pretty obviously has something to do with st. However, this just happens to be the first affected, doesn't mean it's the last. Not only does Google hate sites that are full of dupes and / or link farms they also hate webmasters doing ANYTHING to improve results. Link trades, buying links and a whole host of other things we do are not things they agree with. They will eventually tweak their algo to take into account everything they hate about you.

I run ST free on a few sites haven't noticed drop at all, in fact one site has grown around 1.5K uniques last two days so ya unsure not from traffic trades either......

woot woot

I was first for 1 keyword (the same as domain name) for 7 years. Now 65.

I redesign my site to TGP from toplist 3 months ago and in any case the site is still full of anchors and texts, not only thumbs like others TGPs...

And I use over 30% of my own unique galleries instead of FHG.
I use pay-version, no any link to smart-scritps.com

80% of ALL my traffic trades are NOT TGPs, these are my very old traders, link lists, blogs and sites with content.

But my google traffic dropped from 12k to 0k.

The only one thing is the same like on other sites: outgoing links to /st/st.php...
Is possible that's the problem ???

negative for some things, positive for others. fuck you very much for your time google

I have no way of knowing what google is really doing but it seemed that my google
traffic increased when I stopped trading traffic on a domain.

But I also did a lot of other things too like converted it from TGP to tube.

I just put a trade link back up a week ago so if I crash and burn in a month then
I would say the trade script is a problem.

Just a guess but I think this will come down to the "skim" factor.

no one really knows ..

I think your on to something there.... Google might be penalizing linkscripts, ST might only be the first. Either way if that's the case, just rename the st.php file. If you can't well... then your kinda fucked on that. Get a different script.

This could be the end of skim TGPs. If that's what Google is going after....

Na, nothing to do with smart thumbs. I have a ton using them and they actually rose in ranks over this update..hoping it sticks.

hmmm

What happened?

Agreed.

Like they care?


I chuckled when I heard your voice.

That is probably true,but again fact is majority of st sites dropped from their rankings,i would say 99 percent.
And also what if those which not dropped yet they have their rankings only because google bot didn't reached them yet?

I'm really sorry for your guys, I know how this feels (waking up one day to find most of your traffic is gone). I did recover however and I hope you will too

I haven't been using ST for ages... though I think it sucks, that was really great script. My first tgp was on ST... huh memories... :(

I doubt you could have a site ranked high for any competitive keyword and not have the googlebot visiting at least once a day.

Well who knows,its still possible considering change cannot be instant in such huge operation as google.

I lost my #1 spot for a VERY VERY good niche keyword that I held for several years. 8500/day niche specific google hits gone. I run a paid ST with all custom galleries hosted on my servers.. Which sucks ass.

Looks like it's true. One of my sites where I used smart thumbs and had 3k Google traffic has almost nothing now.

I'm so happy that I don't use smartthumbs on my other sites :)

This is what I was trying to say in the beginning but I guess I failed to convey it too well, most likely because I was pie eyed when I posted. And I link/quote:

http://www.gfy.com/15979514-post31.html

What you will do to resolve this problem?

1) Have a beer
2) ????
3) Cash in my checks

Here is an idea. Stop jerking the surfer all over the place, hand build your shit with minimal scripts like the old days, trade your traffic with well described hard links, no out.php crap that cloaks URLs, etc. and maybe Google will like you better.

Like the surfer, I assume that the Google Bot gets sick of it too after a while.

Most of the sites mentioned in this post (and the others that I know of or found while searching) get you a gallery what? Maybe 20% of the time? And then on top of that, a bunch of those end up auto installing (or attempting to at least) some sort of trojan or malware.

If I owned Google, I would not want my surfers encountering this shit when they are searching out related content. People use search engines to find what they want and 3/4 of you give them everything BUT what they are looking for.

If these are the results that you get with Google, why use Google? I wouldn't. Think about it from a surfer's point of view. Maybe they are just sick and tired of the adult webmaster's way of generating traffic, period.

It sucks this fell onto Smart Thumbs' lap, but who knows, this might only be the beginning of a much larger ban hammer that has yet to rear it's ugly head. :2 cents:

You know one can run a perfectly surfer-friendly site that uses 'out.php'. It's a way to keep track of trafficflows. I have plenty of sites that have my old UCJ copies that have no skimming, no bullshit, just clean galleries and hardlinks..BUT they're run thru my UCJ so I know what's going on.

1)Resolved
2)!!!!!
3)Resolved too
:upsidedow

it does look like that google dropped all tgp sites running smart thumbs

Those that sites was affected too?

Not all,there are some which still ranks,i even managed to find 2 of my 60 st sites which didn't dropped.Too bad they only have 30 se hits daily.
I noticed those 2 sites which didn't dropped have very little outgoing links compared to other sites,i wonder did this happened because of too many outgoing links.

All the sites that I use ST on have been affected, skimming or not.. however so far the sites that use say UCJ + AGS have not (yet) been affected.

What were you using for a trade script on the ones that were? Is there any similarity? This may or may not help narrow it down.

Actually now that I re-read this post it makes no sense. ALL of you sites have been affected, yet some of them have not? :upsidedow

From what I've seen so far, the trade script used doesn't matter.