SEO Challenges for Adult Businesses

In an industry as fiercely competitive and specialized as the adult industry, conventional SEO techniques may fall short.

Our company, Adult Creative, has implemented industry-specific Adult SEO strategies that go beyond generic solutions to uniquely cater to this market. Here’s how we do it:

Industry-Specific Challenges

Typically, we find that businesses both in and outside the adult sector still need to optimize for the same key pillars in order to maximize the reach, discoverability and success of their content, these include:

• Performance
• Security
• User Experience
• Onsite SEO
• Offsite SEO
• Technical SEO

This being said, while adult businesses may share common tactics to those outside of their sector, a unique set of obstacles must be overcome in order to beat their competition and satisfy their audience.

Negative SEO attacks

Negative SEO is more than just a buzzword in this industry. The impact of a successful negative SEO attack can be detrimental and long-lasting for your online business. Negative SEO attacks occur when bad actors attempt to scrape content, leave fake reviews, DDoS attack, hack, or point toxic backlinks/link networks to your platform.

Content Scraping

Content scraping occurs when bots, harvest substantial data from a website without the consent of the owner. This practice can be detrimental to your website’s performance, especially if your unique content is duplicated and used by others who might then rank higher in search results, overshadowing your original work. Moreover, if there are any security issues on your website, there’s a risk that these bots could access and extract confidential information, which could be a serious concern. It’s important to safeguard your site against such vulnerabilities to maintain the integrity and the rightful ownership of your content.

DDoS Attacks

The most common and damaging issue faced by adult websites from the list above, is the threat of DDoS attacks. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can bring websites to a screeching halt, and unfortunately, they are all too prevalent for businesses within the adult sector.

DDoS attacks are caused when a malicious actor attempts to target a server or network in order to flood them with so much web traffic that normal operations are disrupted.

Hence, our company has spent a small fortune on implementing defensive measures to protect our adult hosting clients against such malicious tactics. To combat these attacks, our network specialist has developed a specialized infrastructure to fortify the security of our servers and cloud services, now mitigating even large-scale DDoS attacks.

Picking the Right Domain: A Crucial Decision

The first step to any successful SEO campaign is choosing the right domain name for your business – your choice of domain can make or break the success of your SEO campaign. Domains within the adult industry often carry a bad history—like manual action penalties for egregious content—that can haunt the new owner. Moreover, Google may even choose to stop indexing your pages, making your SEO investments futile. While other domain names may already come with an outstanding reputation, brimming with hard-to-get backlinks and unforgettable branding. Always conduct a thorough history check before choosing a domain.

We suggest following these steps before purchasing any domain name:

• Use the search operator “Site:” followed by your domain name to find indexed pages, look to see if there is any indexed content that may harm your reputation.
• Check domain name providers to see which other variations may be available – snap them up if you think your brand name might be sought after.
• Use a backlink analysis tool such as AHREFs to check the quality of your backlinks, how relevant the anchor text is, and find any hints of customer sentiment towards the previous company that owned this domain (e.g. forum posts and reviews).
• Search for your desired brand name on Google – are there already similar brands? You may struggle to outrank them if they are already well established.

The Future of SEO in the Adult Industry

Looking ahead, it’s going to be important for adult businesses to adapt to new technologies and stay ahead of the curve by keeping their codebase up to date. As Google becomes more adept at crawling javascript frameworks, and AI on the rise, we anticipate a surge in highly intelligent algorithms and lightning fast performance for online applications. We feel the best way to “future-proof” your adult SEO strategy is to focus on users first and continue focusing on producing high-quality content. Google have released documentation on how to do this.

This article was brought to you by Adult Creative, the leading web development and marketing agency for businesses in the adult sector.