Polyfetish

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

BDSM Reference may come to be a site I regret starting. To live up to the title it needs a few hundred very boring entries: it should be comprehensive.

Two boring sentence can require more energy than ten that amuse or move the typist.

This is one time I regret being a one-person operation. But that is the nature of the beast.

With lucky maybe I can bring occasional whimsy to the dull definitions and find some really oddball or at least useful kinky lore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if to most people Femdom Weblogs and Femdom Blogs look the same.

Femdom Weblogs is essentially a directory. I try to find one of the blog author’s better posts – some people have such badly structured sites, especially money Dommes – and quote part of it. I link to the blog’s home page, not the post. If my reader visits the site to read the whole entry they will have to dig for it: forcing them to read more of the site than they might otherwise. I’ll list any F/m blog: even bad ones. The goal is to be exhaustive. A blog gets mentioned one time only.

With Femdom Blogs I try to point people to interesting entries by F/m bloggers. Sometimes it is an essay that I think is good. Others it is something that I can easily imagine a specific kind of reader be glad to be pointed to. I try to not limit to just my taste. Over time I’m sure I’ll refer to certain writers regularly because they often have something interesting to say.

After I initially seeded the directory I’d expected more people to submit their sites. No such luck. I guess I haven’t publicized the directory adequately.

I could’ve gotten more inbound links by requiring reciprocal links from those who listed their own site. But I don’t want to do that.

It isn’t a good idea. Google notices when all the sites that are linked to link back. And the Search Engine Domme doesn’t like reciprocal linking schemes. I sometimes smile at the little “proudly listed” badges I see on some blogs. Often site they are pointing to has been flushed into the back hole of irrelevancy by Google.

At least some of the people listed in the directory have gotten plenty of traffic.

I guess I’ll have to go back to seeding it for a time.

Just hit me to add Furry fandom to the directory. Maybe with a small initial seeding others will feel encouraged to add furry sites to the directory.

I wish I could get more submissions from gay women and bisexual persons.

Though my sexuality is fairly broad my gendered is male: very normal male from the outside. (I prefer invisibility in myself and flamboyance in my partners.)

And I’m too comfortable with my pansexuality to really feel like reading about bisexuality, though I’ve written a little about biphobia.

Hopefully more sites for both will get listed.

While I’m in no sense ashamed to the directory I’m surprised that I actually posted a note about it on Digital Point.

DP is a webmaster forum and generally I don’t mix my sexually themed webmastering with general forums.

Mostly, I’ll have to own, because I’d tend to expect foolish questions and maybe juvenile guffaws since some of these guys are fairly young and are apt to defend a choice by calling it the “best” without supplying any supporting logic.

There’s no reason for you to visit Digital Point unless you are really interested in webmaster related topics. Certainly not to advertise.

Another small landmark: one month and three days old and there are over 250 sites, the average quality of which is quite high (easily better than the Yahoo Director’s equivalent areas).

I’d really like to seek the sections for F/f D/s couples and the sexual health sections expand.

Be interesting to see how large the directory is a few months from now.

My beloved is a ftm transsexual so it was natural for me to want to include sites that might be useful to other transsexuals.

Little did I suspect how much hostility I’d encounter.

She made a mention of this on a transsexual mailing list. The response was hostile. The presence of “fetish” in the sites name made some claim that being listed in The Polyfetishist Directory would hurt the image of transsexuals.

Sigh.

Narrow-minded people will never change their view. And I was long ago disappointed with the transsexual craving for normality. Banality in my eye. Often a wish to be the kind of woman that feminists – thankfully – have diminished in quantity.

Hopefully the directory’s list of resources for transgendered persons will increase even without their help.