AdSense publishers cannot use AdSense on adult-oriented sites. This has been a long-standing policy of Google’s. To quote the relevant part of the AdSense program policies:

Sites displaying Google ads may not include … pornography, adult, or mature content

In most cases it’s easy enough for publishers to know what qualifies as adult content and to refrain from showing ads in those situations. But what if you’re dealing with user-generated content?

User-generated content — comments, postings, searches, ratings, etc. — is a great way to get traffic and links, but it can also open up Pandora’s box. Because people talk about sex. They search for sex (literally and figuratively). They tell dirty jokes. They post nude pictures. They do all kinds of naughty things, things that might not be kosher with the AdSense program policies.

So what do you do about it?

The first step is to make sure that all the non-user-generated content on the site abides by the program policies. That shouldn’t be a problem.

The second step is to determine whether or not adult/mature user-generated content should be allowed on your site at all. For some sites it’s a no-brainer — family-oriented sites being a prime example. If you don’t want adult content, make sure your terms of service state that fact and put some mechanisms in place to moderate the content. (If you’re building communities, you’ll be surprised at how well the community itself can police its own members in this regard — that may be all that’s needed.)

Assuming you’re OK with adult content, the third step is to deal with it appropriately. You could, for example, create “adult-only” areas of a site where such content is acceptable. Or have a way for users to flag/vote on objectionable content and let visitors set their own “filtering levels”. Squidoo has this feature, for example.

But what do you do in place of AdSense if you have adult content? Because AdSense ads will not be displayed on adult-oriented pages once Google determines what’s on those pages. The alternatives aren’t hard to figure out:

• Don’t display anything at all.
• Join an adult ad network.

You’d be surprised at the number of affiliate programs available for adult material! Let’s face it, if big Web 2.0 players like Squidoo and StumbleUpon benefit from porn, there’s nothing that says you can’t, either. Unless you think all pornography is evil, of course.

But we’re not here to debate the pros and cons of pornography, just to discuss what to do about adult content on your AdSense sites. The safest approach is to avoid it altogether. If you can’t, or won’t, then try to segregate it. Then decide if you want to monetize it.

Lots of news today about how Yahoo’s going to be testing the use of Google’s AdSense program for the ads it displays in search results. My first thought was that YPN publishers wouldn’t be too happy about this, would they? It’s an admission from Yahoo that their own text advertising program just isn’t good enough to compete against AdSense — something that isn’t really a surprise to most AdSense publishers, but if you’re a YPN fan this must hurt.

Any AdSense publisher who depends on organic search engine traffic is naturally very interested in their search engine results page (SERP) rankings. It’s not unusual (and it’s good practice) to monitor the rankings for key search phrases, especially for those lucky times when you’re in the top 10 results one one or more of the search engines. Anyone who’s been there can tell you there’s a drastic difference in the amount of traffic a #1 ranking gets versus a #10 ranking — you want to go as high as you can to maximize that traffic flow.

For competitive search terms, links to your site have a lot to do with those rankings. Obviously, on-page SEO (good title, use of headings, keywords sprinkled in text) plays an important part, as does the internal linking structure of the site (which are really the only links you can truly control, so you should use them to full effect), but ultimately it’s the links from external sites that are going to boost you up to the top. Getting those links isn’t always easy, but there’s a time-honored method that sometimes makes a lot of sense if you do it right: reciprocal linking.

You Scratch My Back And I’ll Scratch Yours

Reciprocal linking (sometimes misspelled as reciprical linking) occurs when two websites agree to link to each other in order to exchange traffic and/or increase search engine rankings. Back in the old days when pages got ranked almost literally based on how many links they had, reciprocal linking was de rigueur, because it was an easy way to get lots of links. Both sites benefited, so there was really no reason not to do it.

Search engines soon wised up to the fact the reciprocal linking was artificially boosting rankings for sites that really didn’t deserve high rankings, so they started discounting such links in their calculations. The reasoning, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it, is that non-reciprocal links (sometimes called one-way links, although of course all links are one-way) are more authoritative — the fact that you link to a site without requiring that site to link back to your site must mean that you really like that other site.

So reciprocal links now have a lot less worth than non-reciprocal links, especially if the links are between pages that don’t have a common theme.

So Scratch My Other Back

Of course, it didn’t take people long to realize what was happening and look for other ways to benefit from reciprocal linking without making it look like reciprocol linking. Thus the three-way link was born. A three-way link is a set of three links that are spread across three sites. Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A. Technically, there are no reciprocal links… but there is a path to and from any site. And there’s nothing that says it has to be three sites: you can do a cycle with four sites, five sites, six sites, and so on.

Can’t find anyone to link to in such a cycle? No problem, there are companies out there that will do it for you automatically and charge you a monthly fee for the privilege.

Are Reciprocal Links Worthless?

There’s a belief that reciprocal links are worthless. They’re not completely worthless. You can still get traffic from them (traffic and rankings are separate things). And you still get a small boost from all those links.

The best use of reciprocal links, though, has to be a technique called link laundering, which I suggest you read about. If you’d like to implement something similar, use a subdomain and install the free LinkEX script. Take some topically-related PLR you have sitting on your disk (c’mon, we all have some!) and create a site from it on that subdomain. Just a couple of pages will do, plus a link exchange directory. Insert a couple of links with good anchor text in the content. Then gather some links to the subdomain via the link exchange script. Then you’re laundering links using simple reciprocal linking.

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Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.