Converting Chinese Adult Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

Adult Industry Standards – What Are They Exactly?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

For some, the term ‘industry standards’ might seem like an oxymoron and, in such a wide spread global industry this might just be the case, the adult industry is not regulated in any way shape or form however, this term is thrown around with the best of them.

In this article we will take a quick look at some of the ‘standards’ which have been set and, for the most part, seem to be accepted across the online adult industry as a whole.

Industry Standards – The Basics.

‘Industry Standards’ are, in effect a set of guidelines or rules by which any person operating a business in a specific sector operate by. These may range fro charging a standard price for a product, operating in a certain way or something else. Most industries have their own set of specific ‘standards’ which are usually upheld regardless of whether they are actually written in law, as regulations, rules or, unwritten, unspoken standards.

Adult Industry Standards – The List.

This is a list of the 4 most common ‘Adult Industry Standards’ that webmasters would seem to operate their businesses towards, these are not ‘official’ industry standards more general operational guideline which are accepted as the ‘norm’ in our industry.

1) Adult Webmasters should use ‘legal’ content.
2) Adult Webmasters should abide by the rules of the sponsors they use.
3) Adult Webmasters should not promote ‘child pornography’ or imply the promotion of the same.
4) Adult Webmasters should operate their business within the scope of the law.

Taking the above four items into account, there of course, other standards by which webmasters already self-regulate to some extent for example, you shouldn’t steal other webmasters work, content, bandwidth (through hotlinking), etc. However, other than the four primary ‘unwritten rules’ above there doesn’t appear to be any special ‘code of practice’ to which webmasters should or even, can adhere to.

Taking the above information one step further, lets take a quick look at the adult industry sponsors, almost all of them have a different variation of their Terms and Conditions however, implied or otherwise, most of them tend to stick within the confines of the details already mentioned above. This in itself can lead webmasters into some troubles for example, promotion of sites, most sponsors have unwritten rules about what webmasters can and cant do to promote sites, no spamming paysites, no misleading links but, again, there are no ‘set’ rules that any two sponsors seem to say in the exact same manner.

Adult Industry Standards – Self Regulation.

We all know by now (at least those of us whom have been doing this for a few months) that the adult industry is pretty much self regulated and, whilst this is almost certainly a good thing it can also lead to complications. For example, ‘Webmaster A’ does something to promote a site that they got permission to do whilst, ‘Webmaster B’ does the same thing without having permission. in this instance, more often than not ‘Webmaster B’ will the one who gets their name blackened in the industry. it would also seem that, whilst those webmasters who have a long standing in the industry are capable of getting away with certain things, others, who perhaps have seen things done, when they try the same they get ridiculed.

Adult Industry Standards – Overview.

As ‘Adult Webmasters’ and, i would like to stress the ‘Adult’ part of that job title we have a lot of information thrown at us from the very first day of joining this industry, how we choose to use that information is up to us on an individual basis. That said, until the ‘standards’ are set on a level playing field i cant help wondering what effect, negative or positive our own style of self regulation is having on our associates and peers, does it help that we can go to message forums and call sponsors, hosts, other webmasters cheats? or, does this hinder our industry on a much wider scale?

One thing is for certain, if i were a journalist writing a report on the adult industry as a whole, i don’t even think i could write about the actual ‘business’ side of things after all, we all run our businesses as we see fit and, at the same time, read the rule book that would at least, for the time being, suit us as individual business owners.

Article written by Lee.

Tips For Submitting To TGP’s

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

One of the most popular ways for getting traffic to sites these days is to submit galleries to TGP’s and because it is so popular there is a lot of competition for getting listed. If you like, it is a buyer’s (TGP’s) market, with the supply of galleries exceeding the demand. For example, at Richard’s Realm we only list about 60% of the galleries submitted and that’s after we’ve filtered out unwanted free hosts, free email addresses and submission bots. If we didn’t do that we would be listing about 20%-30% of all submissions.

Before you begin

Submitting to TGP’s is a numbers game. It’s all about volume and percentages. The amount of money your gallery generates can be estimated using a formula with 4 elements:

Total Hits To Gallery X Click Through Ratio X Signup Ratio X $ Per Signup = Total Revenue

So, for example, 1 in 25 surfers to your gallery clicks on a banner or a link, you use a sponsor paying $30 a signup and you have a 1:400 signup ratio with them from your TGP traffic. The formula then becomes:

Total Hits To Gallery X 4% X 0.25% X $30 = Total Revenue

You can see now that the only thing remaining that will affect your Total Revenue is the Total Hits To Gallery. If you increase the Total Hits To Gallery the Total Revenue will also increase.

Of course, experienced TGP submitters also know that you can work on improving the other elements of the formula to improve Total Revenue. They tweak their galleries and change banner and link placement to maximize the Click Through Ratio. If it is improved and rises from 1 in 25 (4%) to 1 in 20 (5%), their Total Revenue increases overall by 20%.

Building the gallery

Examine the formula above and you will see that two elements can be manipulated at the gallery building stage: Click Through Ratio and Signup Ratio.

It is always said, and surprisingly often overlooked, but select a sponsor for a gallery which complements the gallery’s content. For example, if you build a big tits gallery use a big tits sponsor. With more and more TGP’s becoming categorized people surfing the big tits category will be looking for bit tits and are more likely to be interested in a big tits sponsor!

In addition, be sure to use sponsors which are not overly-used, sponsors which are little known. If you go through a TGP you will see the same sponsors and banners showing up all the time. If a surfer sees a banner 10 times they are only going to click on it the once. So even if you build the perfect gallery with top notch banner placement and pictures, if the surfer clicked on the same banner on the previous gallery they’re not going to click on yours!

Selecting TGP’s

There are hundreds of TGP’s you can submit to. It is usually advantageous to select TGP’s that only post your type of gallery, as well as the more generic ones. For example, submit to TGP’s which only list big tit galleries or galleries with one-legged midget lesbians (if that’s your niche). The more targeted traffic will usually result in better click-through ratios and better signups, especially if you’re using a new or little-known sponsor for the particular niche.

TGP’s with a moderate level of traffic that send a few hundred hits tend to be quite good. Admittedly, to get any real volume you need to submit to quite a few, but consider using TGSW to do the bulk of it. My reasoning for using the smaller TGP’s is that they tend to list fewer pages and the surfers tend to be less “professional” and adept at dodging banners.

Submitting your gallery

There are no real tricks to this bit, but it is very important to remember that TGP’s usually get far more submissions than they need or want. You must try your best not to give them a reason to reject your gallery:

• Read the rules carefully and follow them. The TGP webmaster doesn’t put them there for fun and if you break them it’s possible you will be blacklisted.
• Look at the galleries already listed on the TGP to get some idea of what the webmaster likes.
• Don’t try to be smart and use different names and email addresses to avoid the per webmaster submission limits. Although galleries can look very different, reviewers have a good memory and can often recognize designs, layouts and descriptions. If they spot you trying to cheat you’ll probably end up getting blacklisted.
• Take a look at their TGP and see what kind of description they like, Adult Buffet have very different descriptions to Richards-Realm. This might not determine whether or not you get listed, but it’s a chance to get a good description of your choice and, hopefully, more hits.
• Select the right category for your gallery. If you submit your gallery to the “Teens” category and it should be in the “Mature Women” category it will get put there or rejected. If you get the gallery listed in the wrong category you may get more hits, but if a surfer is expecting a nice young lady in the pictures he’s just going to hit his back button and look at the next gallery in the list – probably not even giving your banners a chance to load.

Monitoring your gallery

Once you’ve submitted your gallery you should keep an eye on how it performs. View the stats to see who listed you, how many hits they sent and how much you made from the gallery. It is even worthwhile to create galleries dedicated to specific TGP’s, so you can monitor their performance even more closely. If a TGP sends lots of hits but no signups it’s probably worth no longer submitting to them or changing the gallery to see if you can improve the click throughs or signups. Compare before and after stats if you make changes in the gallery layout or sponsor to see if they’re working.

Whatever you do keep tweaking and monitoring your galleries to get the best possible performance for each of the elements in the revenue formula.

Article written by Richard

Direct Debit Payment Explained

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Something that is very rarely spoken about as a means of payment is Direct Debit, this is a popular payment method across Europe and, especially in the United Kingdom. Direct Debit can offer your surfers a cost effective, easy way to pay for products and services from your site especially, if they have a ‘recurring’ cost associated with them.

Direct Debit – What Is It?

Direct Debit is quite possibly one of the simplest ways to collect funds from your surfers basically, a form is filled out by the surfer, where they enter their bank payment details, account number, name, sort code. Then, the form is signed either electronically or, in person by the customer, in this case, electronically by the surfer.

Once you have the direct form filled in by your surfer, you may continue to deduct funds from the bank account on the Direct Debit form until such a time whereas the surfer cancels the Direct Debit agreement.

At the present time, around 45% of the population in the UK currently choose to pay their utility bills online by Direct Debit and, around 75% of the total population in the UK have used Direct Debit at least once in addition Direct Debit is also an alternative method of payment in the vast majority of European countries and, it is also used (although not as much) in Australia.

Direct Debit – What Are The Cost?

Direct Debit payments cost around $0.5 for you as a merchant to process, however, this charge, rather than happening on the processors side of the transaction, happens when the Direct Debit request hits your banking account.

This in itself is god news after all, you now ensure that if a membership or product costs $35 per month, you will get virtually the full cost of that membership until such a time when the surfer cancels the direct debit at their bank.

Direct Debit – An Overview.

All in all, Direct Debit is probably one of the only payment solutions that allow you to collect the full price from your surfer at the point of sale and, furthermore, because the Direct Debit method of payment is trusted, this offers your surfers something that no other form of payment can – Peace of mind. There is however one major drawback to this method of payment, it is very hard to find processors that will allow you to utilize Direct Debit on your sites in fact, to date, the main use for the Direct Debit payment method has been payments of utility bills, Gas, Electricity, Water Supply, etc however, many financial institutes will let you pay for goods and services using Direct Debit on ‘credit’ terms which can vary from 1 day to a year interest free or, not as the case so often is.

I strongly feel that within the next 12 months this method of payment could become advantageous to the adult webmaster however, the current online payment processors need to be pushed in order for this to become as widespread as credit and debit card processing is. That said, there are a few online adult companies already accepting Direct Debit as a form of payment so, at least the ‘DD’ revolution has already started.

Article written by Lee

Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 4

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 4.

Here we go with stage 4 in our surfer trap.

We should now have a pretty basic surfer trap set up with consoles on all of the FPA’s all of the links on all of the FPA’s (Excluding the FPA graphics) should go to either another FPA or, the a POTD Program.

As mentioned in the last stage we are going to start building up some traffic to our surfer trap even though, we are not finished yet.

The first place where you can get some good free traffic would be from a toplist counter.

A good counter that I would recommend would be one of the following:

Outster http://www.outster.com (A Gay Specific Counter)
SexTracker http://www.sextracker.com (A General Adult Counter)

You need to sign up to ONE of the above counters and only ONE.

Usually a counter will ask you for some details when signing up for them these will usually include:

Email Address.
Site Url
Name

For the email address, enter a REAL email.
For Your Name, Enter a name you wish to be known by to the counter owners.

However, for the URL (The one to SEND traffic to FROM the counter) you should enter the index.html page of your surfer trap (The Multi-Site FPA).

You will now be given some coding once you complete the counter sign up process. This counter code you now need to place on EVERY page of your surfer trap.

Place the counter towards the bottom of your FPA’s (Including the Multi-Site FPA) this way, they will load after the rest of the graphics or at least, they should in theory.

Basically what you are doing by implementing this counter is as follows:

For each time the counter is displayed or clicked on your site (Depending on the counter you choose) you will earn one credit on the respective counters toplist.

Each credit you earn on the toplist will move you higher up the list.

Now, the higher up the list you get, the more visitors to the counter site that you are going to get visiting your surfer trap by clicking your link on the toplist.

In return, by clicking on your surfer trap link from the toplist, they are ‘registering’ another impression of your counter hence, getting you one more ‘credit’ on the counter toplist hence, moving you higher in the listings.

See where we are going with this?

The more clicks you get from the counter to your hub, the higher you will get on the toplist in the process earning you more and more traffic to filter through your surfer trap.

Adding these counter codes to your FPA’s as they stand at present should take you an hour or so to do so, for now this is where I will leave the traffic generation section of this tutorial.

Article written by Lee

Mirroring Adult Sites – Stage Two

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion, Tutorials | Response: 0

Ok, in stage 1 of this tutorial we learnt the basic ‘setup’ for our multisite generation now we have to start putting the rest of our puzzle together.

At this stage in the tutorial we should now have a 50 pic free site, all of the images are in the appropriate folder on our HD along with the HTML in their own folder. If you have not already done so, you need to ensure that when you add/added the links to your individual HTML pages that you call the images like this:

/FreeSite/Images/pic1.jpg

The Thumbnails like this:

/FreeSite/Images/Thumbs/thumb1.jpg

The gallery links like this:

/FreeSite/Galleries/gallery1.html

And the FPA from the warning page like this:

/FreeSite/FPA/fpa.html

Why are we calling the links like this and not like, http://www.mydomain.com/FreeSite/Galleries/gallery1.html I hear you ask, well the answer is simple, in order to use this site TEMPLATE over and over again, we need to ensure that there is a standard way of calling the links, this way, once we decide duplicate this site on a different domain, all we do is upload the folder to our server with a different set of images and we have another set of sites built.

Ok, we now have our free site but, we have some empty folders that need filling up, here is how we are going to achieve that.

What we now have to do is re-open the Gallery Pages, DO NOT change the image calls or the thumbnail calls however, what you will need to do is select 15 TGP’s that you would like to submit to, download the recip buttons for these TGP’s and save them in the /FreeSite/Images/Recips/ folder.

Now we have the gallery pages open we need to modify them like this..

Take the top text link that you created and replace that with a 3 cell table. In this table for the first gallery, you need to call the first 3 recip links for the TGP’s you want to submit to and link them to the appropriate recip url for each of the TGP’s again, calling the recip images like this, /FreeSite/Recips/recip1.gif. Also, you will need to modify the text link at the bottom of your gallery pages, I would suggest creating an 8 cell table, containing 8 niche text links, four of which should go to your Single-Site FPA’s (as created for the surfer trap) and the remaining 4 text links should go directly to your sponsors site tour page.

Now save this newly created page as tgp1.html in the /FreeSite/TGP/ folder. Do the above again for the remaining 4 gallery pages but calling a different set of recip links each time. each time you modify a gallery page save it in the /FreeSite/TGP/ folder so gallery2.html would be renamed to tgp2.html, Gallery 3 would be called tgp3.html and so on.

What you should now have is a single 50 pic free site with 5 galleries of 10 pics, all pics going to the larger image on a HTML page and, 5 TGP galleries.

This is as far as we go with the tutorial today however, in the next stage we will continue to fill in the rest of the puzzle pieces.

Article written by Lee

Robots.txt – Control The Robots That Crawl Your Sites

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Search Engine Optimization, WebDesign | Response: 0

By writing a structured text file you can indicate to robots that certain parts of your server are off-limits to some or all robots. It is best explained with an example:

# robots.txt file for general use on web servers.

User-agent: webcrawler
Disallow:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /logs
The first line, starting with ‘#’, specifies a comment.

The first paragraph specifies that the robot called ‘webcrawler’ has nothing disallowed: it may go anywhere.

The second paragraph indicates that the robot called ‘googlebot’ has all relative URLs starting with ‘/’ disallowed. Because all relative URL’s on a server start with ‘/’, this means the entire site is closed off.

The third paragraph indicates that all other robots should not visit URLs starting with /cgi-bin or /log. Note the ‘*’ is a special token, meaning “any other User-agent”; you cannot use wildcard patterns or regular expressions in either User-agent or Disallow lines.

Two common errors:

Wildcards are not supported: instead of ‘Disallow: /tmp/*’ just say ‘Disallow: /tmp’.
You shouldn’t put more than one path on a Disallow line (this may change in a future version of the spec)
Ultimately, without the use of robots.txt files on your servers/domains, you are risking a variety of potential problems including, unauthorized access to your cgi directory, unauthorized viewing of your site stats, possible spamming of the search engines by accidental crawling of doorway pages.

One distinct advantage however of having a robots.txt file on your server is that, quite simply, you will be able to tell when and where your site has been indexed or potentially indexed as, all robots will automatically call for the robots.txt file BEFORE any other page on your server so, as long as you keep an eye open for any calls of this file, you can see who is knocking at your site for indexing purposes.

Below is a robots.txt example that you can copy and paste into a text document to use on your own server:

<!–Start Copy Below This Line–>

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /logs

<!–End Copy Above This Line–>

The above will allow all spiders to crawl all of your site except the subdirectory’s ‘cgi-bin’ and ‘logs’ which, may be altered to suit any subdirectory’s you do not wish the spiders to crawl on your server.

Article written by Lee

Obscenity – Put It To The Test

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Regardless of how long any of us have been an adult webmaster we all need to be
aware of obscenity laws and, in particular how they affect our businesses
whether we think a hardcore photoset is ‘obscene’ or not ultimately, if you get
taken to court on obscenity charges the one thing you should be aware of is how
the courts will decide whether the images you are using will be classified as
obscene or not.

Testing Obscenity – The Miller Test.

The Miller test was developed in the 1973 court case of Miller vs. California
and in comprises of three parts ALL of which MUST be satisfied on order for
something to be deemed obscene by the courts. The Miller test is the ‘official’
method used by the United States Supreme Court for determining whether an
expression or a speech can be determined as obscene and, if deemed obscene, it
is not protected under the First Amendment and is therefore prohibited by law.

The Miller Test – Part One.

Part one of The Miller Test states something may be obscene if ‘the average
person, applying contemporary adult community standards, would find that the
work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest’ In essence, this
means that if the ‘average’ person on a jury or on the bench finds the work to
be deemed obscene then, it is. However for the court to rule something as
obscene it also has to be deemed obscene by the standards set in part two and
part three below.

The Miller Test – Part Two.

Part two of The Miller Test states that something is potentially obscene is
‘the average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, would
find that the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual
conduct’. Basically this is saying that if the images or speech is something
which is not practiced in a manner befitting your local community standards
then again, it may be obscene. However, as with part one of The Miller Test for
a court to find something obscene it needs to fall below the standards in part
three below.

The Miller Test – Part Three.

Part three of The Miller Test states that something is potentially obscene if,
‘a reasonable person would find that the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious
literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.’ This is pretty much where
you could potentially come unstuck after all, everyone has different sexual
tastes and because of this, just because something that may be widespread such
as ‘bare backing’ (to use as an example) could potentially be considered as
obscene if you happen to have a jury who are devout practicers of safe sex.

The Miller Test – Overview.

In essence The Miller Test is a useful guideline for webmasters when it comes
to operating our sites and specifically, when it comes to choosing the types of
content we utilize on them however, for the most part The Miller Test itself is
outdated. Since the early 70’s when this test was devised there have been many
sexual practices that were once deemed obscene that have become more a part of
everyday life and accepted in to society as whole thus, what once would (or
could) have been deemed obscene would no longer be in the same sense as
something that may be deemed obscene today could be found not to be in 5 years
time.

Article written by Lee

The Death Of The AVS – The Birth Of The AEN (Adult Entertainment Network)

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General, Promotion, Sponsors, WebDesign | Response: 0

Well after a long and tedious few months of speculation, rumors and facts being presented to those of us in the adult industry working on AEN sites (Formerly known as AVS sites) it seems that Visa has put a strain on AEN companies to start re-working and, renaming their sites to fall under the ‘Adult Entertainment Network’ name. What does this mean to us as webmasters and, more importantly to the industry as a whole? This is what we shall address in this article.

A Little Visa History Lesson.

This whole mess started in October of 2002 when, jointly, CCBill, Epoch and, iBill issued a new set of operating guidelines that had been passed onto them by Visa. In effect, this meant that 3rd party credit card processors had to be re-classified as an ‘IPSP’ or ‘Internet Payment Service Provider’ this also in turn meant that webmasters needed to start paying ‘fees’ to Visa (via their IPSP) in order to continue charging their surfers for access to products and services by using Visa issued credit and / or debit cards.

In addition to the initial $750 however, there is also a need to pay an ongoing fee of $375, two thirds of this fee goes directly to Visa and, the remaining balance goes to issuing banks and IPSP’s for administrative charges.

Shortly after this announcement was made the industry then got dealt another blow by the processing companies, this time, in the form of Paypal announcing they would no longer accept any adult orientated payment through their system. This went into effect on May 12th 2003 and, after initial speculations as to what could and could not be charged to Paypal accounts, it seemed to be the final nail in the coffin for some of the smaller webmasters.

However, the adult industry is strong and rallied together getting as much information as possible about alternates to both of the above situations and companies such as Stormpay and off-shore IPSP’s started to see an increase in revenues from adult payments.

As The Waves Settled – The Next Blow.

Given all of the financial troubles of the previous 10 months in respect of online adult payments the industry as a whole started to settle itself again, of course there was the usual posting on forums, conversion ratio and shaving discussions happening on the main forums as there always was but, in addition to these conversations more rumors started, this time, regarding the AVS business model.

Almost as quickly as these rumors started however, they seemed to have fizzled out into nothing but a distant memory but, two months later after the first round of initial conversations on the adult industry message forums, the same AVS business model was dealt another devastating blow.

It seems Visa has its sights set on AVS (Age Verification Service / Systems) with a press release being issued first by Sex Key, then by Free Age Card, which was followed by similar announcements from Global Male Pass and Gay Passport informing adult webmasters that they had 2 days to make their current AVS sites conform to the new requirements set down by Visa.

These requirements were that.

1) Adult webmasters can no longer use the term ‘AVS’ on their sites.
2) Adult webmasters can no longer use the term ‘Adult Verification Service’ or ‘Age Verification Service’ on their sites.
3) Adult webmasters can no longer state that surfers joining up to their AVS will have ‘Access to thousands of other AVS protected sites’.

As usual Adult Webmasters started to question the reasons behind this sudden and apparent change of AVS rules on almost every forum and, whilst most questions went unanswered the one thing that was answered (honestly) was that these new rules had been set down by current AVS IPSP’s who, had had these rules issued tot hem by Visa.

So, webmasters started to change out their tour page text to conform to these new rules and, for the most part, it seemed like that was all that was needed to be ‘safe’ working the AVS business model. Little did they know…

One Last Blow To The AVS Webmasters.

Several days after the initial press releases from some of the top AEN (Formerly AVS) companies was made it seems that in between all of the posting ont he boards yet another issues comes to light – That Visa is aiming to have AVS webmasters now pay a $750 fee for the benefit of being able to keep using this business model as stated by Craig Tant (Sex Key) ‘we believe is that every site will have to be registered and pay the $750.’

This beleif, although somewhat vague tends to draw conclusions that, through no fault of their own, the AVS / AEN business model in the adult industry as we currently know it is changing and, changing for the worse. If webmasters are forced to pay Visa a $750 registeration fee per AEN system or per AEN site then a lot of todays industry leaders are going to come unstuck, especially those that focus solely on the AVS / AEN model for the primary source of income.

Adult Entertainment Networks – What’s Next?

This is the question that is currently being asked by many webmasters and, the truth of the matter is simply that nobody knows – Except for Visa, the next few days, weeks and months are going to be telling on the industry as a whole from what happens to current sites inside the AVS / AEN companies websites to what happens when surfers start to propagate back onto the adult internet looking for their fix of high quality porn, two things however are definitive throughout all of this, Visa is homing in on the adult industry and, every webmaster needs to be concerned about what will happen next.

Article written by Lee

Domain Name Extensions + SEO

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Search Engine Optimization, WebDesign | Response: 0

With a slew of new TLD (Top Level Domain) extensions being launched in the first quarter of 2004 in addition to the hundreds already available how many of us actually take time to consider that when we register a .com, .net or, .org domain how will these sites help or hinder us with our search engine work? This is what we will take a closer look at in this article.

Domain Name Extensions – What Are They?

First of all, before we look at how the extensions of our domain names can assist us in running our search engine optimization methods we need to understand what the TLD’s themselves are actually for. Domain name extensions are essentially a way to recognize specific locales via the usage of domain names so for example, the domain name extension .com were primarily set up as commercial domain names however, with the commercial use of this extension it has also become, without a doubt the most popular extension for individuals or companies registering new domain names. In addition to the TLD extensions there are also a selection of domains extensions ranging from industry specific extensions such as .aero to country specific extensions such as .co.uk.

Domain Name Extensions And Search Engines.

Now we understand what the domain name extensions were put in place for we can now start to look at how they may benefit us in terms of SEO (search engine optimization) for example, head across to http://www.google.com and do a search on something such as ‘penis pills’ you can see from the results shown (01/01/04) that the first 10 results are evenly spread across a range of domain name extensions ranging from .com to .net and also some smaller .go.ro domain extensions. This would lead us to assume that at the current time, Google specifically is not paying to much attention to the extensions of the domain names we are using however, given the recent updates of the last month or two across Google this has also cleaned up a lot of the results that were present 2 months prior to this search in which the .biz extension was highly populated in the rankings.

Domain Name Extension Abuse + Spam.

With this slew of new domain name extensions being launched what seems like yearly this also opens up a whole lot of new problems for the webmaster primarily that of the domain name spam. Because domain names can be registered for as little as $5 per year many webmasters have taken to purchasing them, using them to spam the search engines and then, once the search engines discover the spam and remove the offending domains, the webmaster then moves on to new domains in effect, making domain names a disposable commodity to them. Whilst this method will certainly garner traffic for the search engine spammer it will also in turn mean that the traffic that honest webmasters receive from the search engines will be lower.

Domain Name Extensions And Optimization.

Hopefully this brief article has given you a little insight into how domain name extensions can both benefit and also detriment your business, by choosing your domain name extensions carefully and, making sure you do your best not to spam the search engines you can make some serious income from pure search engine traffic however, once you start to buy domain names with lesser known extensions to purely spam the search engines you are not only wasting your own money but, are also potentially wasting other hard working webmasters money too.

Article written by Lee