Re: Watching Initial Traffic
Domain authority in this context is how important a site is in the eyes of the search engines (particularly Google). It’s determined by many factors including the age of the domain, the quality of the content, the number of inbound links, and the importance and legitimacy of those links. Domain authority is also keyword based so a domain can become an authority on particular keywords.
Let’s take the example of the term “bareback”. Here are the top 10 positions for that term…[LIST=1]
bareback.com
en.wikipedia.org
barebackjack.com
thefreedictionary.com
randomhouse.co.uk
video.google.com
confessionsofabarebacktop.blogspot.com
gaylife.about.com
barebackplace.com
barebackresources.com
[/LIST]How many of those are genuine bareback sites with bareback content? Very few. The reason why they rank for the term is because they have domain authority.
Bareback.com gets it in every link they get to their site since ‘bareback’ is their name, literally.
Wikipedia is the king of domain authority. They can rank on just about any term because their site is trusted and people link to it on keywords.
Bareback Jack has been around forever - it was one of the first domains I remember in the niche. The age of the domain has a lot to do with domain authority, so he’s doing well in that respect.
Free Dictionary and Random House would be similar to Wikipedia in terms of why they’re ranking. Big domains, safe, solid, etc.
video.google.com - they know people look for bareback videos, so this seems relevant and it has domain authority.
Confessions of a Bareback Top - this one I know something about… He’s a guy who lives not far from me who has a blog where he talks about how he talks guys into barebacking who don’t really want to bareback, or how he’ll cum in a guy’s ass when the guy tells him to pull out. There’s even one about where he allegedly drugged a guy and raped him in a bathroom. He’s the classic example of how linkbait can work for an adult site. He was so controversial that he got mentions on gawker.com and some other sites - the links he got from those sites contained link text with the word ‘bareback’ and voila - links from trusted sites = domain authority, and he ranks for the keyword. It’s really frustrating to me how he got up there, but unless I want to start fabricating stories to brew controversy, I’ll have to get up there some other way…
The point in all of this is that major domains rank for keywords much easier than little sites with better content for that keyword, and links from major trusted sites can give valuable link juice to smaller domains.
From another perspective, with every link comes come link juice (unless the referring page has a penalty and can’t pass link juice). That link juice applies to the domain as well as to the page it links to. Many smaller domains never equal the power of a single domain with the same content and links. Sure, you can pass link juice around a blog network - sort of (that all stops if Google figures out it’s a network). And using that scheme you can give some credibility to a new site. Even though that looks like it works, they’ve tested things and the same “site” will do better as a directory of a larger, more trusted site.
Think also about the link text on inbound links. Let’s say you have “latino porn” and “twink porn” and “raunchy porn” - all of those contain “porn” so Google starts thinking more highly of you in terms of the general term “porn”… You can’t achieve that sort of thing with a network of blog sites.
Each site (domain or subdomain) has to prove itself - the search engines put it through a sandbox period to figure out what sort of site it is. This isn’t true of directories on existing sites - they get instant credibility.
So… That’s the basic logic behind building a battleship instead of an armada… The one thing about a battleship though - you’ve got to keep it clean and avoid penalties since those penalties can affect the entire site. But when it works, it should work really well.
There is a ton of info in there.