The Polyfetishist Directory’s Publisher
When AdBrite moved my sites to Black Label Ads they forgot one. I contacted customer service to point out that it was a sexually themed site and should be transferred. No reply. Ever.
I haven’t approved any full-page ads for any of my sites. My publisher’s dashboard shows this. And I don’t allow any ads to ever run without my explicit authorization.
But my Black Label Ads statistics page shows full page ads running. Running without my permission.
I got an email from MyBlogLog advising me to check Yahoo!’s adult use policy. The next day I noticed that three of my blogs were no longer showing traffic statistics. They all had either BDSM or fetish in their titles. I removed them.
Like most of my sites their language was very chaste. I forget the online tool I used but once I tested several of them and they didn’t register as even mildly risqué.
The one site that I would consider adult was still listed and showing traffic statistics. I removed it myself.
Like most large web entities MyBlogLog is incapable of discerning adult content from innocent sexual reference. By their standards the Mayo Clinic site is a cesspool.
On my related Yahoo! account I got a warning that I’d been reported as violating Yahoo!’s Terms of Service. I never violate anybody’s TOS.
Many years ago my primary email account was on Yahoo! One day they cancelled it without warning. Nor was any explanation available. My inconvenience was huge. And for years I stayed away from Yahoo!
Given this I’ll have to remove what business I do with Yahoo! – like domain registrations – elsewhere. You just can’t trust Jerry Yang. Ask his stockholders.
Like most people who write about sexuality I’m not hostile to pornography. Personally I take no pleasure in it but do believe that those who want it should have access to it. I hate stupid victimless sex crime laws.
I’m very reluctant to link to adult sites, not out of personal problems with their content but because of Google’s treatment of them:
No matter who links to you and who you link to, you’re in a bad neighborhood. If real estate sites got bitchslapped for excessive reciprocal linking, well, porn sites’ been in hot water for years. Google doesn’t trust links in adult …
Top 7 Reasons Why Optimizing Porn Sites is Hard
See also a rather naïve short note with lots of comments by search engine marketers: Kids, Plug Your Ears! I Am Going to Talk About SEO P_rn!.
Annoyingly those of us who produce sexually themed sites are often tarred with the same brush because many Americans cannot distinguish between porn and sane, open discussion of atypical sexuality – or are comfortable with non-mainstream mom’n'pop sex at all.
Reciprocal linking schemes are best avoided as a matter of good practice. But this is even truer when you get requests from sex toy sites, TGPs, top sites and the like. They provide no value and if they do anything it will be to pull you down.
Chaste linking practices are the best in the long run.
I’d like to find an application that would let me place an add on all of my kink and fetish themed sites at once. So I could sell the whole ‘network’ as it were. To just one advertiser.
Then I’d sell a long term ad to just one advertiser. I’ve been approached by people for something like that. Sadly, I don’t remember who.
Actually I’m not even looking for cash. But for someone who would buy/swap a decent laptop computer for ten months or so on a bunch of sites at once.
When AdBrite and AVNads split I just followed over to Black Label ads.
Later I joined AVNads and added a few sites. I haven’t had a lick of luck with AVNads so far.
I do not allow Black Label ads to automatically insert whatever network ads they think appropriate. Every ad has to be approved by me. I don’t want to see “Fuck Buddy” on any of my sites. And I’m chary of the word ‘porn’ and few others. Not that I mind pornography. But I try to be mindful of my visitors sensibilities. Even if it costs me revenue.
My sites are about sexuality; they have a fair number of female readers. While I don’t think most of them object to porn there’s kind of, um, ‘tone’ that I want to preserve. (I wouldn’t mind trying a porn site or two but am too damned afraid of the current administration to try.)
So I manually select each Black Label ad.
With AVNads it appears you can say yes or not to network ads and no more. So I’m not offered any.
I took a look at some of AVNads publishers. Damn, what incredibly high levels of traffic. My sites may be just too trivial for them to bother with. They don’t have the small entrepreneurs, phone sex operators and the like who advertise with me via Black Label Ads.
The other day when I tried logging into Movable Type on one of the servers on which I have it installed I got an Error 500. That had happened on a different server with the same web host a few days prior. They were upgrading php and it corrected itself in less than half an hour.
I kept trying to log in but continued to get the error. Finally I noticed that Movable Type was trying to run the upgrade script. Since I’d long since upgraded that I’d removed that script’s permission to execute.
A quick CHMOD and the upgrade script ran yet again. But once it was done all was well.
About as peculiar as it gets.
I suspect Google has opted to keep BlogSpot blogs from accepting trackbacks the traditional way is a means of combating trackback spam. I can certainly understand that.
There is a solution of sorts. Not likely to be much implemented since so many BlogSpot bloggers are technically unsophisticated (to say the least).
Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice’s original post. Now Alice’s post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular comments on a post.
When all the sharp master bloggers were talking about MyBlogLog I ignored it. When Yahoo! acquired the service I still paid it no mind.
Honestly, I’m not sure why I finally signed up.
What does the service do? Among other things:
MyBlogLog enables you to track that last little bit of information about your website. You probably already know where your users are coming from and you probably already know what pages they’re looking at while they’re there. However, if you have a blog or any other site where you frequently post new content on the main page, you don’t have a good way of tracking what people find interesting. One way is to track when people click on the links you provide. Up until now, outbound link tracking has been a pain in the butt, requiring CGIs and managed links. MyBlogLog makes this process easy.
And the stats indeed are interesting.
My MyBlogLog page:
The estimable Maymay calls on webmasters to learn elemenatary SEO and usability.
It’s pretty common knowledge that only the most persistent users will click through a web site to find what they’re looking for. Most users will click on one or two links and if they haven’t found what they’re looking for, they’ll go back to their search engine of choice and try all over again. Then lather, rinse, repeat. As a web developer, every decision you make impacts your users, so you damn well have a good reason for doing something. If you don’t, you’re doing it wrong.
One of my sites gets a huge amount of traffic. But it gets few comments.
I’ve seen sites / blogs with much smaller traffic levels receive far more comments from the readers.
I think that I often seem to be writing ex cathedra and in a sense – that this makes me smile because I know my limitations – with intellectual power. A couple of people have told me that there doesn’t seem to be much they can say to add to what I’ve written. Without vanity I think I can say that maybe it is that what I write somehow strikes my audience as intimidating. Or at least very impersonal.
This isn’t a big issue for me. I could easily create a series of posts that would prompt lots of comments. That kind of emotional manipulation would be easy. I won’t do it because it seems almost a psychological crime. A rape of sympathy.
And it would also require that I dumb down what I write if only in terms of what is called “emotional intelligence.”
So I content myself with feeling grateful for the tough and good humored – and largely female – part of my audience that shares their thoughts and feelings without any worry that I’m a deep thinker or something equally silly.