SEO Talk - Why Did Freeones Take a Hit?
 

It's a well established website with lots of returning visitors and has content that they obviously want to see. So why did they get hit hard twice by Panda/Penguin updates?

My guess is because they are an affiliate site.

What do you all think?

Are you sure about that?

wouldn't then all affiliate sites get the smack down? I'm not sure if I agree

https://siteanalytics.compete.com/compete.com/

OUCH. 50% drop from last year. But Roald said they did okay last year so I guess unless you think he's lying who knows.

I don't know a lot about Freeones but it could be the affiliate links like you said? It might also be the back links (coming from a bunch of penalized affiliates). Or could it also be a bad Time on Site or bouncerate metric? At least compared to his tube competition who has the 30 or 40 minute videos?

Sure about what? The site being an affiliate site as the reason? Not completely. It's just my guess.

But if you're asking if I am sure they got hit then yes. Roald said so in another thread.

I was thinking about that too. As long as google uses a time-on-site metric and gives it such importance then the serps will reflect it.

It depends on many different factors like the ratio of affiliate links to content and whether you are using nofollow metatags. It's common knowledge that Google sees most affiliates as enemies despite what they say. They tend to see affiliates as spammers and sites with little or no unique content. They don't want to openly declare war against thousands of people who could start contacting their congress person or begin PR campaigns against them though. So they put out this "we don't hate affiliate sites" PR and try to deny it while silently killing the affiliate sites in their algorithms.

I would bet on ToS and bouncerates first though.

my site lost 3/4's of its Google traffic - not a thing has changed on the site in years and suddenly Google whacks it.

Hm i noticed the same, not so lately if you have searched for a pornstar name, then usually freeones came up in the first three serps.. now.. fucking tubes lol

Google is fucked, I'm now using Bing most of the time for searches.

Yes pinguïn did not like us a lot. Took quite a hit in Google in te last 6 months or so. Revenue seems not really hit though but I'd prefer it the other way of course.

We are workin on a few things atm and looking into causes and solutions.

They've been making pro-tube (the questionable kind) comments since at least 2008 and used to say they were sick of people talking about it. I don't hate Freeones (and Roald is one of the nicer guys here) but I'm not exactly lamenting them getting fucked by their tube competition either. Everyone else has been dealing with it so now it is their number which has came up.

On a side note call it a little sick on my part but I'm somewhat enjoying watching the industry crash and burn (especially for the assholes at the top) as what many of us have been warning others about for years comes to pass. It'll make for interesting times when several of these tubes can no longer afford to pay for bandwidth with the revenues they are making. It's moving towards that fast.

because they are not a Tube

Lol im still sick and tired about it all. Tubes are great for surfers and google is acting accordingly. Now believe it or not we kind of saw this coming, of course still sucks but it all makes sense to me.

Should we have gone the tube route ourselves? Perhaps but we always decided against it and we believe in our own product.

We ar still far away from crashing and burning :2 cents:

Google and its animals gone totally insane.

The question should be "why is everyone with a search engine question so fucking retarded"

WHy?

Why not?

Google updates its algorithms daily with many very major updates a year. With that, shit changes. All sites get affected. Some more than others. Some rise, some fall, some rise again and fall again. Always been the case.

There doesn't need to be a "why"

Great site :)

So that's why my sales are shit lately compared to a few months ago.

there ya go

I agree.

Then why did they get hit so hard?

I agree, specially the ToS

doesnt change the fact that Bako and perhaps a few others still think it's a great site ;)

I think there does. It's not as random as you make it sound.

You're right that sites go up and down in the search results but lately many affiliate sites have been going down in a general way. Meaning they'd go down and then back up (but not as high as they were before) then go down again and never recover. So they aren't just riding a cycle.

In mainstream, many small and medium size business are pissed as hell because they think google is favoring big brands and even google's own shopping network and fucking over the others even though they have 'quality content' which often times is much better than the big brand.

We want to know why. Our businesses depend on it. If not, we'll start a campaign against them (which we would do in various ways of course) if they came out and admitted they hate affiliates and porn but they don't because they don't want to lose out on any % of the search (and therefore revenue) pie. So they keep telling us they love us and to keep trying to 'please' them and we'll be okay.

So yes, I believe it's damn important to know 'why'.

...

Many probably do. I hope you recover.

I remember talking about this to you at the Freeones party a few months ago. As cliche as it sounds, it's because of the damn tubes! People go to them, stay on them, and return to them almost daily for longer lengths of time. That goes a long way with the new Google algo. There are some things I see Freeones doing that are extremely smart (like keeping video content on the site) - that made me a killing back in the Jays XXX Links days, but that was (admittedly) a different time.

That all being said, www.freeones.com is (in my opinion) the best porn site online now and truly the Wikipedia of pornstars.

:2 cents:

It is probaly beacuse freeones dont buys hardlinks howmuch i know,while tubes buy them in big quantity.Irony at google is,while there is like more then 200 signals/factors which determine rankings,if you have a shitload of backlinks you will still rank good.I find it amusing how some seo companies / tube seo guys almost have no clue about seo beside buying hardlinks,yet that still working good for them.Recent update hit some of tubes but they lost only 30% percent of traffic plus lost traffic didnt went to non-tube sites,it just now going to other tubes which also buys hardlinks.

Since it is an algorithm, yes there does have to be a reason. Maybe it is obscure but there is a reason.

That is true. You can still move yourself in the SERP by acquiring new links.

Another Google success story.

Remember that Freeones was held up as a shining example of how to do a porn affiliate site, in the "leaked" instructions to Google testers (around the time of the first Panda).

So if Freeones is hit, we're all hit. Affiliates are BAD.

Confirmed. :2 cents:

freeones.com does not have to change anything or do anything wrong, incur any penalties etc at all to tank in the SERP's. All adult sites are connected. All are interlinked. The movement of any site affects all others, whether its noticed or not.

SEO talk is 99% bullshit, myth and hype... and its all that bullshit, myth and hype that people spend their days fretting about.

Been in this game for a long time. The fundamentals of SEO have changed very little. Page titles, dabble of on page text, backlinks/anchors. etc. ... but to hear people talk about it every fucking day since 1998, each new day is always the end of days.

Google gives people what they want. It's pure insanity that people think people search for porn or a porn star and are desperately hoping to find a confusing link list... instead of full length videos.

Furthermore, you WILL NEVER KNOW why they tanked for a phrase - making the entire conversation pointless to begin with.

It's over buddy, you may as well just sell freeones.com to us now for $20k, send me the invoice, I'll do you guys a favour and pay it asap :winkwink:

Name a non-tube site that hasn't had a decline in traffic this past year, according to alexa freeones is climbing again, alexa seems to be more current than compete . com

Can you possibly toss us a few pieces of meat that may help us out of what's going on with Google or is Google to unpredictable at this time ?

Many are suffering. I feel this should be the time we all pull together. :2 cents:

Like said above we dont buy hardlinks or do any real tricks or anything. I personally believe (hope haha) this benefits us in the long run. Also we dont turn things around 180 degrees all of a sudden. Give it some time and see what happens.

What we are doing is just some basic stuff, optimise code, proper urls, work on content, etc. All things we would have done anyways.

Of course its becuase of the tubes, this makes perfect sense to me even though we might not like 'm.


Yeah what was that about lol

Done deal!

Smart man. Perhaps the most intelligent thing said in this thread.

Freeones has always been one of my favorite sites on the Web. I like collections of links so i can find what I want, all in one place. I think Freeones will rise again as the pendulum swings back to people realizing they themselves have to do a little digging and research rather just relying on Google's top few spots.

What I mean is people are LAZY. They search for a term on Google and click the top few links. This is all what we want, right? To BE those top few links? Well what happens when people start to realize those top spots are all rigged! Either it's Google sucking big corporate dick or the results themselves suck, leading to the same old tube sites with the same old content.

Sooner or later surfers are going to catch on that they, themselves, will have to do a little work again to find what they want and a site like Freeones will be there waiting for them because it's perfect for that. :)

(PS: I don't make a dime with Freeones in any way, I just love their site.)

Me too :(

another update.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-p...ate-17094.html

Fun topic!

We were slammed by the latest update... dropping 1/2 our Google traffic in one night.

The funny thing was that a month before, another update must have been released. In that time frame our Google traffic went up around 15x. All to just crash overnight. Since then it's improved by 20%, but still way down.

Like Freeones, we do everything organically. No skim trades, bought links, etc... Even past that we haven't even opened up the site to advertising.

Another funny thing is... with all the new Google traffic we had, our sales didn't change at all. That kind of debunked my idea of SE traffic being the golden goose. (Yes we're 1/10-1/20 the size of FreeOnes, so maybe not the best metric)

For years I have thought Google traffic was the target of all of this. I spent months on end perfecting the backend and frontend of the site to make it most optimized site in adult. During this time Google was saying how important Page Speed was and how it was going to be a huge ranking factor...

What happened... our site would average 96 to 100 on Google's Page Speed with no differences in SERPs. Now Page Load Speed is a discontinued "experiment" in Webmaster Tools. Was it wasted time? Not at all... our site still loads very fast which is great for the surfer. Also, with a decent amount of traffic our servers are sitting at 1-3% CPU usage.

Basically what I have arrived at... Don't build your site to please a search engine. Just make it the best you can for the surfer. Also, make sure you don't rely on one source for your traffic. Google still is our second largest source of traffic, but even now Twitter is catching it pretty fast. Not to mention the vast % of our visitors are bookmarkers.

Don't know if you can still say our site is new, but it's strange if every month isn't a new record month for income. Also, our traffic is a bit down since the loss of Google traffic... but for the year it's still way up over previous years.

I think everyone is right with TOS being the main culprit here. Does it make sense to start embedding videos and hoping to increase TOS? Sure for right now, but that doesn't do anything to protect you from the next algo update. I thought unique content and page speed were key. With a very fast site and TONS of unique content... I'm not seeing it.

Just focus on diversifying your traffic sources and making the site interesting to a surfer and long term you will be just fine.

FreeOnes does have a great platform for change if they choose though. With probably the biggest adult surfer community, they could easily start to educate their visitors about tubes and what they're doing to the industry and their site. It's fully up to them, but if it's hurting them so much, why not give it a shot?

Would I like to see FreeOnes at the top of every SERP? Hell yeah... beats 20-30 tube sites (most duplicates). Also we have thousands of links up on FreeOnes... just like if we got much larger we have thousands of links back. There is plenty here for everyone :)

:endrant:

1 freeones visitor equals 10k tube visitors when it comes to quality.

Thanks for sharing your insight! I really appreciate it. It's great info. I especially liked reading about your content and page speed experiments and how by chasing the G algo you were always one step behind.

I noticed you are on tumblr? Any worries about having that blog terminated?

Bingo.

:thumbsup

No problem :)

Not really too worried about Tumblr, we're not even posting adult images on it. We are linking to our galleries though... so who knows :Oh crap

Actually a good thread on GFY. When you build a great website you don't need to do funny BS tricks. I wouldn't worry too much about it, just keep on doing business as usual.

uninstall google analytics,webmaster tools.. Problem solved.