Polyfetish

On and off people have suggested that I start a kink-themed forum site. That always struck me as a mad and bad idea: launching a forum is easy enough but getting ongoing participation is tough.

But I’ve finally gone and done it, the site is called Fetish Lore.

My goals with it are probably conventional enough: attract smart likeable people who don’t think there’s One True Way to engage in the various forms of S&M, B&D, M/s, Whatever-The-Heck play: good-humored free spirits.

A second set of visits I’m hoping for are people who are nervous, perhaps confused by propaganda and porn and aren’t sure how to match their desires - perhaps their lover’s desires - with themselves and reality. And help them learn.

Visit the Fetish Lore forums.

Anchor Text

If you were to link to this site by name the anchor text would be Polyfetish. Were you to link to the site by description it would be Richard’s site about sex blogging (or something like that, however this place turns out).

The search engines are seduced - to a degree - by the anchor text. So I suggest using the site name at the least, perhaps some descriptive phrase is really better. But the latter’s effectiveness depends on how many people employ similar words when pointing to the site.

Title Attribute

In the same place between the brackets where you put the “http: … ” you can also put title=”words about this link” The search engines pay some attention to that as well. Again, the effectiveness depends on how many people use similar phrasing in their links.

Some people think that links to specific pages within a site can in some ways be of equal or greater value than links to the site’s home page. But only if others are linking to that page.

Search engines are quantity queens.

As I said in my prior entry having my right sidebar content and not the entry proper appear in the Google search results for my pages seemed very unhelpful.

Someone searching for information on milking or orgasm denial wasn’t going to be motivated to visit if the text they saw was about refinements of corporal punishment.

My second worry was: I have no idea if Google treats the first part of the text it encounters more heavily than the rest but why take the risk?

I’d switched to lightly modified versions of the most recent Movable Type layouts so that I could use the various CSS style sheets from The Style Contest. The idea of making a website suddenly look very different by switching the style sheet seemed more exciting than it proved to be. (In this very specific instance.)

The upshot is that I modified my templates to shift the unique content to the beginning of the page even though the style sheet causes it to appear in the center.

The default templates seemed rather “noisy” to me.

Putting the links to the prior and next entry at the top again adds irrelevant words to the top of the page. Besides you hope your reader isn’t looking for another essay until they get to end of the current one.

One the individual entry pages the strongest header - <H1> - should be the article title. Not the name of the site. You need to emphasize what is unique.

And lots of clutter has strong headers - <H2> - which is best reserved for just one thing. I chose the articles category archive link.

Hopefully with the unique text is emphasized and the headers more focused Google will treat theses pages when (if?) it takes a second look at them.

In my prior entry I noted how Google had slapped Down On My Knees into the ground when it modified the mysterious math that generates the search results in an effort to clean out the spam bloggers who were littering the results with their blog, which existed only to promote commercial porn sites.

As I watched my traffic build back up and ebb I had to wonder if there weren’t any other factor at play. I’d read that Google was tightening up its duplicate content filters. Essentially Google sees no reason to display pages that contain identical information. This helps it keep out sites that just regurgitate, say, the contents of the Wikipedia or DMOZ with ads attached.

As anyone has seen some of my sites knows I like to pack my sidebars with all manner of things: extracts from visitor comments, links to the category indexes, etc. So on a page that contains only an illustration and a few remarks there is probably more stuff that appears on all 1,000+ pages of my sites that original words. And even on a page with a long original essay the distinctiveness of the page is diluted.

I’ve trimmed back the duplicate fat some. Probably not enough. I want people to see those comments in hope they’ll prompt the reader to add some of their own: you know how shy most people on the web are. And I want the navigational elements in hope it will cause visitors to a page to explore others.

It is tough to be torn between doing something that you hope benefits the visitor and offending the Search Engine Dominatrix.

In looking at Down On My Knees listings on Google I kept noticing that the content quoted in the portion of the page shown was the beginning of the comments section of the sidebar. That spawned two thoughts:

End of Part II

A few months back I noticed that Google had stopped sending Down On My Knees thousands of visitors every day. Suddenly it was none. I checked and almost every page had been moved to Google’s supplemental index (meaning these pages aren’t worth a damn).

Not again. My original website (which now lives on as four separate sites) had something similar happen a couple of years prior. That time I knew why (or have always thought I did). While the site had thousands of pages it also had even more thousands of affiliate marketing pages generated by scripts. Google eventually reacted to the junk pages and devalued the whole website. Fair enough. I just wish I’d understood before it happened so I could’ve kept the affiliate pages under control.

Shortly after Down On My Knees got zapped I learned that many sex bloggers were hit. Google assumed that all the sex bloggers were exploitative pornographers. Susie Bright was sufficiently well known that in her case and other highly visible sexuality bloggers the error was corrected.

Now I’m nobody in the great scheme of things. But as Google fiddled with the algorithm controlling this I got about a third of my Google traffic back. Well, for a week or two. Then it dropped to a tenth of the prior level. And so it has stayed for the last couple of months.

End Part I