well... people here seem to be too dumb to actually research whats going on and what the alleged "position 6 penalty" is.

i had wondered why i found references to it that were a year and a half old... but had never heard of it. when it initially happened, Googles position was that it was a glitch and I believe it was corrected shortly thereafter.... which explains why people haven't been screaming about it for the last year and a half.

its very common for them to test and tweak and tune different aspects of the system at specific data centers (independent of the others) and to see these sort of issues which are usually unintended consequences of attempting to deal with something else or testing methods to deal with something else.

Something happened that affected ST. a key and important point is that it didn't affect ALL ST installs or ALL ST installs of the free version. that suggests that it has nothing to do with the script (which they wouldn't try to target manually anyway) - but that there is a greater common thread between the sites running ST and the free version of ST. I would guess that the connecting factor is the clusters of sites and who is linking to who that triggers this.

When you take a bunch of shitty spam sites and link them together to other shitty spam sites and trade links with other shitty spam sites, you're begging for trouble. i still suspect that the common factor is the quality of sites and how they are linked together. Sites with shitty back links/hard link trades are more likely to be affected negatively than sites with stronger back links

I'll say it again for those who don't want to listen to reality - http://newnubiles.net/ IS a spam site. it is a link farm. just because its a familiar format, or just because its pretty, doesn't change the fact that it is exactly what it is... a cluster of pages with NOTHING but outbound links and with NOTHING unique about them that are auto generated by a script.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=http%...=JJ2lHziM Uzc

When you are generating 1000's of pages that ultimately have a negative PR value, don't even show up in the index and are linking them all together and to other similar sites in your own network as well as doing hard link trades with similar sites... you should expect to have issues.

I would guess that at the end of the day, this is a glitch and will correct itself being that its affecting such a narrow range of sites. I am just saying the likely cause of sites being affected is the link relationships between pages/sites... not "ST". However... the link back to smart thumbs is NEVER going to be helpful to a network of sites. and its NEVER going to be helpful to share that common link/footprint with other shitty spam networks.

However, this doesn't change the fact that people should be waking up to the reality that a crappy link farm in the form of a TGP has no future anyway.

This industry has a very perverted notion of what "the best result" is or should be. And this industry continually fails to understand what a surfer or Google might expect the "best result" to be... but Googles mission is to keep working to provide that best result for users... and webmasters are either working in the right direction or they aren't. TGP's do not exactly provide the best user experience.

I totally agree with this, taking out any links to the script, and adding some internal links would probably help too.

That is patently absurd. A user who searches for "porn pics" is looking exactly for a TGP so if the result bring up some crappy blog or other such nonsense then the user is not getting what he wants. You may not like TGPs as a way to surf for porn but plenty of users do. The user does not care if the site is somehow unique or if it has a good linking structure. That is SEO nonsense that means nothing to the user. If they search for porn pics they want fucking porn pics. They could care less whether the site is properly SEOd or a "link farm" by your definition.

Problem is,even then it will take weeks even months to restore old positions.

You're right. and as i've said a few times, "keyword phrase + pics" or "keyword phrase + galleries" etc is what tgp's should rank for at best and where tgp owners should expect to be in the future as media types and searches/surfer interests change. people shouldn't be surprised when their MGP loses out to a tube site for "porn videos" .. it should. A porn video tube site is simply a better result.

"link farm" is not "my definition"... and it is in fact, what a typical tgp or link directory is.

... but Google does. Google cares very much. That's what Google does (and almost all search engines). The Page Rank formula itself (i.e. the heart and soul of Google) is an accurate predictor of surfer behavior on a site/network of sites. Its a measurement of the probability that you will end up on page A... click to page B and then skip to a new domain's page A and so on.... resulting in a probability distribution of surfer clicks across all pages online... which IS the resulting page rank value for each page. This is EXACTLY how your site is being viewed.

and guess what? blind links/skims screw with that click distribution probability model in the worst way.

This is also why the typical TGP model is fucked for search engines - 200-300 outbound links significantly decreases the probability of any link being clicked on and a page being visited (i.e. making a page more important than others) - this is why almost all tgp's have a main page toolbar PR value of 2 or 3 or whatever, with almost all other pages having no value. (i.e. the amount of "link juice" being passed to any page is distributed across ALL outbound links from that page)


personally... again, i don't care. i think the conversations are interesting... and i also find it interesting watching people resist inevitable change and their refusal to change.

I agree with all of that. My only point is that a TGP is a perfectly relevant result for someone searching for pics and that users could care less about proper SEO link structure. I personally was always baffled as to why my TGPs got easy search traffic when by all SEO theories they should get almost none. Anyway I am still getting good results for "keyword" + TGP.

PleasurePays, great post, wise man.

right... but remember that all of the "SEO must do's" are only as relevant as your competition. if phrases are weakly targeted by others, then you win with minimal effort and while following very few of the typical SEO guidelines. how you rank for anything is determined more by what your competition is doing (or not doing) than by what you are doing.

for example...if you want to rank for "porn movies" - then you have to spend your time studying keezmovies.com, tube8.com, pornhub.com and dissecting what they are doing to come up with a strategy to compete with the volume of links they have. everything you do on site will have minimal impact in that quest.

Tell it to my 100k daily bookmarks...

I can tell you what they are doing: they are just buying hard links at most popular MGPs. Well, at least Keezmovies and Pornhub.

This has probably helped them to gain ranks from their main pages when they started, but it is those scrapers on old established sites like cliphunter that embed their movies that give them backlinks for their movie pages...

Especially not TGP's that skim.

Great posts btw J

yep, they are buying links like crazy :pimp

is it possible to have ST show gallery links as hard-links without the /st/st.php?id=426975&script=1&url= in front?

even if it wont count clicks, this would be a nice temporarily solution.

can this be done with .htaccess? if so some please post it asap, it would be mucho appreciated!!

I did managed to change /st/st.php?id=426975&script=1&url= to /rotator/?id=426975&script=1&url= but i would rather wait for official st update before going further.

I believe my post will provide some revelant information for you guys:

#1) I don't run any ST copy and sites where affected. These sites were #1 in premium keywords for about 5000/day traffic.

#2) I just started checking this out, and already found a reason. Let's say a domain.com site. I did a check for site:domain.com and before I just had one page indexed in google (domain.com), now I have like 20. The pages google have cached are stuff like this:

domain.com/?ref=herseybedava.info
domain.com/?ref=jtqk.com
domain.com/?ref=parax.info
domain.com/?ref=YediNet.com
domain.com/?ref=pislikcs.com
domain.com/?ref=mesajx.info
domain.com/?ref=arabulursun.net
domain.com/?ref=bulara.info
domain.com/?ref=webkizi.com
domain.com/?ref=colegialasvirgenes.da.ru
domain.com/?x=0675.
domain.com/?ref=
domain.com/?ref=BestSearch.org
domain.com/?ref=paylasimturkey.biz
domain.com/?ref=sirket10.info
domain.com/?ref=aradibuldu.com
domain.com/?ref=hanzuo.com
domain.com/?ref=Klasistanbul.Com
domain.com/?ref=zevklivideo.com

I have no idea why, but google indexed those pages. On my domains that did get the -60 penalty (as these sites are all now in position 61 now and were #1) they have those crap indexed by google, all others that are still in #1 do not have those shits. So this must be the reason. This is clearly someone spamming the sites, as all those ref= links are banned/spammers URLs ... I can make it happen to make all those links result in 404 but I don't see a reason why google is indexing those ones really, as anyone can send traffic to any website as ?ppp=CP for example then is that enough for google indexing that page that has the CP query? This is ridiculous...

As you can see, even if I block the ?ref ones, I can already see one spammer starting the ?x= query, so maybe I will need to block all queries and only let domain.com available.

If you know how to help me regarding why google is indexing those weird links, plz let me know.

not sure you know but the official update is out a few days now.. go to summary and you will see a green update link.. for further instructions go to our forum