I’ve got a confusing situation and I’m wondering what people (who understand SEO) think about itâ¦
I’ve built a bunch of new sites, they’re coming along, I’ve got traffic on them, but don’t consider them “done” yet. Put simply, they’re a network of niched sites (bareback, oral, fetish, and vanilla/other are the core niches). Users on any site can see the content on other sites in most cases. That said, each of the niched sites has content which it owns itself â blogs, tube videos, etc. So even if another site can display that content, there’s a canonical meta tag that tells Google which site “owns” it.
The question is about the other content, which for lack of a better term is “reference content” (there’s a lot of it). Basically the reference content came out of the fact that when I was doing blogs with WordPress and tube stuff with MechBunny each of my sites might have the same tag page and so my tag pages were competing with each other and only told part of the possible story. For example all of the sites might have a tag page on “muscle”. Or with a performer like Park Wiley â he’s done condom, bareback, fetish, so there would be stuff about him scattered all over the place. Ditto for sponsor sites that change over time (from condom to bareback, or from a tight niche to something broader) â their content was scattered all over my different sites. So the goal with the redevelopment was to have a single “tag” page that had everything from all my sites. And for things like sponsor sites and porn stars the page goes way beyond a simple tag page and show statistics about the site/model.
When I first set things up I made programmatic decisions based on the data I had on the model, or the sponsor site, etc. But now I’m starting to wonder whether all the “reference material”, tag type pages, should just be assigned (via canonical meta tags) to the most generic site. Originally I saw the vanilla site as a catch-all site that had everything not assigned to the other sites, but in as I’ve developed the site and fleshed things out, in practice it’s got a little bit of everything.
The argument for keeping things how they are (with programmatic assignments that might change over time) is the fact that it spreads out the pages over the sites and more content makes each of the niche sites stronger (theoretically). Plus, do I really want someone who’s looking for TIMFuck or Owen Hawk to go anywhere but my bareback site? And things that are on my bareback site will probably perform better because it’s inherited everything from my rawTOP porn blog and my bareback tube site, and Google should give some credit to that history.
The argument for putting all the reference material on a single generic site is that it will probably make more sense to googlebot since the canonical site won’t change. And it should strengthen the generic site, which isn’t nearly as strong as my bareback site.
A hybrid option might be to assign everything to the generic site but allow for overrides when the person / site in question is strongly tied to one of the niches. So TIMFuck and BarebackThatHole would be assigned to my bareback site, but something like ChaosMen or CorbinFisher (which changed from condom to bareback) would be assigned to the generic site. But then there are question marks like Fraternity X and Sketchy Sex where the “jock” / “college boy” theme is as strong or stronger than the bareback theme. So maybe the criteria has to be that the major theme of the site has to be the niche in question rather than does the site merely fit the niche?
Anyway, if you have an opinion on how I should proceed I’m all ears. I’ll launch a bunch of AMP pages in the next week or so and will probably start any change with those pages and change existing pages slowly over time.
