Google's new algorithm update Penguin has hit a lot of adult webmasters. Some of their pages were hit badly, while others saw no effect at all. Last days I was analyzing weblogs of my own sites and found one site that was hit by Penguin. That's from a list of 50 sites on my first server that I looked at. That's not bad at all. Traffic dropped from 1300 to 750 hits a day. It's a very stable site that mostly relies on search engine traffic. It is online since 2003 and I don't spend more than 3 hours a year of work on this site (yes, you read this right. It is a site concept that is easy to maintain).

Thumb nail gallery posts (TGP) were the first site model that exploited free content distribution for the sake of making money with porn at any price. People would select 12 or 15 images, crop thumbs and make a free gallery with banners. Then they were posted to gallery posts in exchange for reciprocal linking or paid submission password. The concept was much easier than free sites or AVS that were too difficult to build and probably the first and most successful adult promotion model of early days.

It's logical to think adult webmasters need to maintain records of their models' age to make sure they just deploy images and movies of legal adults on their sites. Most European countries maintain strict laws regarding underage content. Publishers are fully responsible for all content on their site - no matter if producers, secondary publishers or normal bloggers. If investigated they will need to prove legal age of models beyond any doubt - even when just holinked. There have been various legal cases in UK and Germany where webmasters were ordered to pay high fines as they had "juvenile models" on their site and were unable to prove age. I believe they just copy/pasted content from others. While this European systems works well, there is no record keeping requirement that mandates a formal arrangement of data. In the USA things are more complicated. Of course it is illegal to post non-legal content and doing so will be prosecuted.

A daily updating blog with fresh galleries and showcasing new graphic content is cool, but as long as each blog post is accompanied by affiliate links, it will most likely be considered as spam and traffic received will be of poor quality. It's commonly known that Google and Bing frown upon excessive affiliate links and banners. Imho it's much better practice to keep growing a blog with lesser frequency and larger, quality articles. Mix related outbound links and sponsor banners. Why not post a link to a Wikipedia page about a famous pornstar or a news article about female sextourism in Bali on BBC? It will do good! Over the past 5 years I have grown around 100 adult blogs and found sites with real genuine content that are updated once a month, are producing outstanding results compared to daily updated picture-sblogs.

I was reading about it a couple of days ago: Megaupload.com founder Kim Dotcom alias Kim Schmitz was arrested in New Zealand together with his partners. Accounts, estates and valuables of 150 Million Dollars were seized and bail denied. Kim and his partners face long years of prison if allegations by the FBI were to be supported by a court. His site Megaupload.com has been among the top 50 internet sites for the past years allowing users to share files that included copyrighted material like songs, movies and TV shows. Now, it hosts one image, only: Owned by the FBI! It also hosted large archives of porn paysite contents that were downloadable for free or for a premium fee.

Black Hat SEO has become part in many webmasters' SEO strategies. Unlike stated on blogs and boards of self-acclaimed SEO gurus there is no clear-cut borderline between white hat and black hat SEO anymore. Adding a little bit of the other side is not so bad after all according to theories about Markov Chain, an important metric in statistical mathematics. Markov chain more or less translates to a certain amount of links in a chain of connections will be sick or obsolete and search engines accept this rule of nature. Actually, it's suspected to be part of Google's algorithm. A threshold for 'sick' connections is somewhere close to 20% and there is a possibility for a generous margin added on top.
This means, if you are a super clean white hat and your SEO strategy is 98% straight you are most likely going to be falling behind. Your profile might look artificially built according to assumptions of unnatural growth. Don't misunderstand me, I am not saying you should turn to black hat tactics. Most likely they are going to hurt you if done in a spammy way, but they could help building natural linking profiles and control branding.

Many programs advertise to be faithful to their affiliates and not skim sales or percentages by utilizing transparent scripts for advanced tracking like NATS, etc. In many cases they do a pretty good job making sure your sales are properly credited, but there are black sheep around who try to save on expenses or steal a buck here and there. I am trying to make a small list of potential dangers to look out for. I am not saying programs are evil in general, but a certain percentage is secretly using lube to get into your backdoor. Here's a small list of potential affiliate shaving methods.