The Tube Sites Are Just Doing A Better Job Than We Are…

[Jay]

Yesterday I (re?)discovered Google’s page speed testing tool…

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

It inspired me to rework the home page for rawTOP.com. I basically rebuilt the page using Bootstrap so it would be mobile-friendly, and took care of some other technical issues while I was at it. Over the course of a few hours I got my scores up rather dramatically. It desperately needs a redesign, but from Google’s perspective it’s vastly improved.

So today I mapped sample pages from all my primary sites, then I looked at how competitor’s pages were scoring. And for all the bitching and moaning we do about how unfair it is that Google shows so much love to the major tube sites – after looking at their scores I gotta say, they earn Google’s traffic by giving Google what Google wants. Their scores were outstanding. Here’s my spreadsheet…

(I’m more lenient with mobile speed scores because everyone in our industry does poorly on that one given that we’re serving so many images and videos).

No wonder some of my sites are slowly losing Google’s favor. My scores suck. And no wonder the tube sites are doing well, their scores are incredible. The only person I found in my brief analysis who got close to them was Bjorn – with GayDemon.com.

So I’m now thinking that UX issues are far more important with Google than they were in the past. And Google said as much in a blog post a couple months ago…

Historically, Google indexing systems resembled old text-only browsers, such as Lynx, and that’s what our Webmaster Guidelines said. Now, with indexing based on page rendering, it’s no longer accurate to see our indexing systems as a text-only browser. Instead, a more accurate approximation is a modern web browser.

Source

[GayDemon]

Re: The Tube Sites Are Just Doing A Better Job Than We Are…

[QUOTE=rawTOP;155166]Yesterday I (re?)discovered Google’s page speed testing tool…

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

It inspired me to rework the home page for rawTOP.com. I basically rebuilt the page using Bootstrap so it would be mobile-friendly, and took care of some other technical issues while I was at it. Over the course of a few hours I got my scores up rather dramatically. It desperately needs a redesign, but from Google’s perspective it’s vastly improved.

So today I mapped sample pages from all my primary sites, then I looked at how competitor’s pages were scoring. And for all the bitching and moaning we do about how unfair it is that Google shows so much love to the major tube sites – after looking at their scores I gotta say, they earn Google’s traffic by giving Google what Google wants. Their scores were outstanding. Here’s my spreadsheet…

(I’m more lenient with mobile speed scores because everyone in our industry does poorly on that one given that we’re serving so many images and videos).

No wonder some of my sites are slowly losing Google’s favor. My scores suck. And no wonder the tube sites are doing well, their scores are incredible. The only person I found in my brief analysis who got close to them was Bjorn – with GayDemon.com.

So I’m now thinking that UX issues are far more important with Google than they were in the past. And Google said as much in a blog post a couple months ago…[/QUOTE]

Yes, I tried hard to get GayDemon.com speescore up but it’s very difficult. Even using Bootstrap and CDN it’s still not the score I would like to have.

I’m dubious of the score that some of the tube sites are getting. Simply because if you actually look at the sites and see how they behave on tablets or mobiles it’s a different story. The score might be good but they are not that easy to use or work that well. Some use really ancient mobile only sites.

This site uses Bootstrap and optimized for all devices, yet it scores less then them: http://www.bestmalevideos.com

Not only that, I found that its easier to get a high mobile score if you use old designs, the more modern responsive designs always gets a low score. So if you go by pagespeed it’s better to do nothing on some sites.

[Jay]

Re: The Tube Sites Are Just Doing A Better Job Than We Are…

@GayDemon;155171

Yes, I tried hard to get GayDemon.com speescore up but it’s very difficult. Even using Bootstrap and CDN it’s still not the score I would like to have.

Well, I for one am impressed by your scores. GD is the only site I found (in an admittedly quick review) that scored higher than the tubes.

@GayDemon;155171

I’m dubious of the score that some of the tube sites are getting. Simply because if you actually look at the sites and see how they behave on tablets or mobiles it’s a different story. The score might be good but they are not that easy to use or work that well. Some use really ancient mobile only sites.

Well, remember, GoogleBot isn’t human. Apparently they can’t see/detect the things that bother real humans like you and me. For example – why do tube sites get away with pop up windows? You’d think that would be a major no-no with Google, unless they’re cloaking the javascript for the pop-up windows.

@GayDemon;155171

This site uses Bootstrap and optimized for all devices, yet it scores less then them: http://www.bestmalevideos.com

Your scores for BMV are good. Desktop speed is 88 for the home page, 90 for one of the video pages (better than all the competitors listed above), and your mobile UX scores 99 (on the home page, 93 on a video page). 99 is absolutely incredible – only Twitter does better. The only problem you have is mobile speed on the home page (55 – the speed for a single video page was well above average at 77). It looks like the fix for the home page is recompressing the images on the site. I’m guessing your ImageMagik call doesn’t specify a compression setting. That’s pretty easy to fix. And then just download all the current images, run them through something like JPEGMini and reupload them.

@GayDemon;155171

Not only that, I found that its easier to get a high mobile score if you use old designs, the more modern responsive designs always gets a low score. So if you go by pagespeed it’s better to do nothing on some sites.

That’s not what I’m seeing. Your Bootstrap’d BMV homepage is scoring an almost perfect 99. And I got a 95 for the rawTOP homepage with Bootstrap.

Or are you talking about a mobile speed score? The whole industry has a problem with that – you’d have to have fewer, smaller, and more highly compressed images to fix that. Or use something like lazy loading for images below the fold.

[Jay]

Re: The Tube Sites Are Just Doing A Better Job Than We Are…

BTW, since I just mentioned JPEGMini, and they just sent me a promo code for “friends & family” I’ll mention that using promo code ‘HOL9E70DD5C’ will get you 20% off until January 1st. (I get nothing out of it – just thought I’d mention it). It works for me, but unfortunately their server version is prohibitively expensive and working it into my regular workflow is nearly impossible. But, for example, yesterday I saw a a problem with my banners, so I just reprocessed that one folder. Figured it was worth it since banners get reused all over the place.

[GayDemon]

Re: The Tube Sites Are Just Doing A Better Job Than We Are…

[QUOTE=rawTOP;155173]
That’s not what I’m seeing. Your Bootstrap’d BMV homepage is scoring an almost perfect 99. And I got a 95 for the rawTOP homepage with Bootstrap.

Or are you talking about a mobile speed score? The whole industry has a problem with that – you’d have to have fewer, smaller, and more highly compressed images to fix that. Or use something like lazy loading for images below the fold.[/QUOTE]

@rawTOP;155174

BTW, since I just mentioned JPEGMini, and they just sent me a promo code for “friends & family” I’ll mention that using promo code ‘HOL9E70DD5C’ will get you 20% off until January 1st. (I get nothing out of it – just thought I’d mention it). It works for me, but unfortunately their server version is prohibitively expensive and working it into my regular workflow is nearly impossible. But, for example, yesterday I saw a a problem with my banners, so I just reprocessed that one folder. Figured it was worth it since banners get reused all over the place.

Yes, sorry that’s what I mean. The mobile speedscore. The issue I have can’t easily be fixed. yes images can be compressed more but part of the problem is that they are slightly bigger than the area the take up, which makes them also look a bit better in retina displays.

I checked the JPEGMini server test, and it says it could only reduce it by 13% more. Yet Google says it can be done by far more… which I think refers to the fact that the images are bigger than they need to be.

[naked]

Re: The Tube Sites Are Just Doing A Better Job Than We Are…

Whenever I do random searches for porn on Google to see where my blogs come up it’s not the tube sites that are first in the results, it’s almost always tumblr sites. I still don’t understand why, considering that tumblr is owned by Yahoo, a direct competitor to Google.

Oh, and thanks for that JPEGMini promo… I’ve been thinking of trying that out.

[totallygay1]

Re: The Tube Sites Are Just Doing A Better Job Than We Are…

No wonder some of my sites are slowly losing Google’s favor. My scores suck. And no wonder the tube sites are doing well, their scores are incredible. The only person I found in my brief analysis who got close to them was Bjorn – with GayDemon.com.

I am not sure if I am right but with the larger tube sites that are out there I get the “feeling” they are more than a single individual sitting at home running a site or working with a small community of people to get their sites updated/moderated. With this idea in mind surely they can pump more money into working on these issues such as speed than a “one man band/small community operation”… Is the possibly the reason for the good speeds, ALSO I don’t usually see them rank that high for specific search terms, Sure tap gay porn into Google and they are top… everything else and Tumblr comes out on top… Which baffles me being a Google competitor and all!

[QUOTE=naked;155224]Whenever I do random searches for porn on Google to see where my blogs come up it’s not the tube sites that are first in the results, it’s almost always tumblr sites. I still don’t understand why, considering that tumblr is owned by Yahoo, a direct competitor to Google.

Oh, and thanks for that JPEGMini promo… I’ve been thinking of trying that out.[/QUOTE]

On this note (backing up what I said above), I have thought on this a lot… I don’t know how goggle operates nowadays but I always remember a few years back that Google put a massive hit on sites with lots of affiliate links (one of the big selling points for jump scripts), It wasn’t they didn’t like affiliates, it was that they were trying to lower the results of more “commercial” sites (or it was said at the time sites which tried pushed people to another site).

With the 300 billion (or so it feels) gay porn tumblr blogs running, they direct nowhere other than to image files, maybe these seem less commercial than a blog or site that aims to direct traffic as an affiliate. We will never truely know what google expects right here, right now, but this is the feeling that I get when I think this… Plus I am sure with tumblr that due to the internal sharing aspect (I regularly see an image with 10,000+ notes meaning it now exists on nearly ever gay tumblr page) that tumblr has a sort of positive brute force effect… Google wants to provide its “customers” exactly what they want, a blog post with 5 comments will always be seen less relevent than one with 5000+ notes.