LOS ANGELES (August 1, 2013) — The Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP) is pleased to announce the latest honorees in its Featured Sponsors of the Month program, which recognizes select sponsors that help to protect children on the Internet from being involved in or exposed to age-inappropriate material.

According to ASACP Executive Director Tim Henning, the adult entertainment industry can share many “good news” stories about its enduring commitment to keeping children out of and away from porn. Among these achievements include the proactive self-regulatory efforts adopted by adult oriented websites and other operators; such as adhering to the ASACP Code of Ethics and market-specific Best Practices, which are a hallmark of these top-tier operators.

Other efforts involve embracing the multiple award-winning Restricted To Adults (RTA) website meta-label which self-identifies a site as containing age-inappropriate material, enabling better blocking by parental content controls and other filtering applications.

“Our new Sponsor Recognition Program is just one way that ASACP helps digital media businesses protect themselves by protecting at-risk children online, while publicly recognizing the substantial achievements the companies have accomplished in this regard,” Henning said. “ASACP wants to help spread this message to legislators and other relevant stakeholders in order to inform them of the facts while they consider the new laws and policies that will affect all online business owners,”

Each month, ASACP will recognize several select sponsors as a means of providing exposure and recognition for the adult industry-leading companies which have committed to supporting ASACP and its vital mission, year after year. This initiative will also help provide a “face” to the wide range of legitimate enterprises serving one of the world’s most vibrant marketplaces.

DatingGold.com

An ASACP Corporate Sponsor since 2007, online casual dating and webcam affiliate program DatingGold.com has shown its commitment to protecting children in a number of ways; such as including the RTA meta-label on flagship cam site WebCamClub.com and vetting profiles and other information on its sites such as flagship dating site, AmateurMatch.com. The firm also offers a number of niche cam and dating sites, as well as exclusive and co-branded sites that have proven popular with promoters and consumers alike.

While all ASACP sponsors are held to the highest standards, there are additional membership requirements for cam and dating sites, as user generated content (UGC) is often involved, and this material is produced outside of legitimate commercial channels that adhere to the existing legal requirements for a performer’s or other participant’s proof of age. Extra steps are needed to help ensure that only lawful images of consenting adults are displayed, and ASACP stands ready to assist its sponsors in understanding the child safety issues surrounding UCG as well as in forming cohesive responses through best practices and other means. Here, DatingGold excels as an example of how proactive measures by content providers can make a difference in keeping children safe on (and from) the Internet.

Cybersocket.com

According to Cybersocket, for more than a decade it has been known as the go-to source for print, online and communications services targeting the broader GLBT community; not only producing the nation’s largest freely distributed gay magazine, with a circulation of 70,000 issues monthly, but also producing the Gay Pornucopia blog, plus a comprehensive search engine and the gay webmaster chat board, TheGayBoard.com. The company also hosts the annual Cybersocket Web Awards, which have become a seven-year tradition of honoring the finest in gay online services.

“It is Cybersocket’s role to analyze, categorize, comment upon and popularize gay and lesbian oriented websites,” states the company’s popular website, which adds that “Cybersocket leads the field in groundbreaking news, practical resources and provocative original content for the GLBT community.”

As an ASACP Corporate Sponsor, Cybersocket extends its leadership position within the global GLBT community to become a powerful voice in the battle to keep children out of and away from adult entertainment; in part by incorporating RTA meta-labeling on its homepage.

CyberStampede.com

A multi-year Corporate Sponsor of ASACP and the association’s SEO agency of record, CyberStampede.com is a provider of global SEO and SEM solutions for today’s leading adult entertainment companies. CyberStampede specializes in on-site SEO work for entertainment and related companies covering the spectrum of the adult business community and impacting traffic and sales for mobile and desktop sites, membership and video-on-demand sites, live cam and dating sites, shopping and product sites, and industry news properties.

The company has also had the pleasure of building and maintaining complex and highly focused paid search (SEM) campaigns for the adult industry’s top brands, spending millions of dollars, profitably and accountably, to help leading industry brands meet and exceed their sales goals online.

“CyberStampede is committed to the highest standards of ethical and compliant business practices within the worlds of adult entertainment search engine and digital advertising, with part of its mission making online child protection a best practice priority for all of the work it does on behalf of its clients,” CyberStampede president Rodney T says. “As a business policy, we engage solely with websites who share our values and who are themselves actively engaged in barring access by minors to mature content online.”

“At the most tangible and functional level within the craft of SEO work, we specifically advise our clients and implement keyword selections which are 100 percent devoid of inappropriate search terms or marketing language which can impact or drive interest to or by minors in any form,” Rodney T added. “Further, within the realm of link-building SEO practices for clients, we advise for and actively pre-screen all prospective link partner sites for keywords and content which are compliant with best practices for the protection of minors.”

CyberStampede is a great example of how an ASACP Sponsor, member, or contributors’ financial contributions can be leveraged through further assistance, such as the promotional SEO work being done on behalf of the association.

What can your company do to help ASACP in its mission, or to support its sponsors?

While diverse in their business roles, these companies are unanimous in their support of ASACP and among those exhibiting the commitment to corporate leadership and proactive self-regulation that exemplify today’s top-tier digital media companies.

For more information, please contact [email protected].

About ASACP

Founded in 1996, ASACP is a non-profit organization dedicated to online child protection.
ASACP is comprised of two separate corporate entities, the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection and the ASACP Foundation. The Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP) is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. ASACP manages a membership program that provides resources to companies in order to help them protect children online. The ASACP Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. The ASACP Foundation battles child pornography through its CP Reporting Hotline and helps parents prevent children from viewing age-restricted material online with its Restricted To Adults (RTA) website label (www.rtalabel.org). ASACP has invested nearly 17 years in developing progressive programs to protect children, and its relationship in assisting the adult industry’s child protection efforts is unparalleled. For more information, visit www.asacp.org.

“Thanks to the continued efforts of Cyber Stampede’s Rodney Thompson, winner of the 2012 ASACP Service Recognition Award, traffic to the association’s website has steadily risen, with more than 69,000 pages of our main website now indexed in Google,” Henning revealed. “This exposure helps ASACP to reach a wider audience, both in the United States and abroad, furthering its mission to keep children around the world out of and away from adult material.” Please click here for more details on ASACP’s Educational Materials Utilized Internationally.

Getting good placement in Google search results can be a matter of life and death for many companies these days. Given that Google is constantly tweaking their search algorithm to improve their search results — and to fend off threats from search rivals like Bing and Apple’s Siri — keeping tabs on how those changes in Google search impact content creators can be a full-time job.

Yet search engine optimization (SEO) has been employed by some website operators to game Google’s search algorithm and increase search results artificially. According to Google’s Matt Cutts in a speech at SXSW transcribed by Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz, the search engine giant is working to adjust their search engine to “level the playing field” against site owners that engage in SEO “over optimization.” (Schwartz has also included a partial transcript of the Cutts speech in his blog post.)

The changes to Google’s search engine should be coming soon, and is yet the latest in a number of tweaks and updates Google has made in an attempt to improve search results. One of the more significant updates to Google search came in the form of the Google “Panda” update in April 2011, which sought to minimize the impact of so-called “content farms” that publish huge amounts of marginal content that is heavily SEO-optimized.

Google is also looking to improve so-called “semantic search,” which is being popularized by Apple’s Siri technology. Semantic search is focused on providing immediate facts to a given query rather than presenting a page full of links to sites that provide those answers.

In a recent interview by Amir Efrati with the Wall Street Journal, Google search executive Amit Singhal said that the changes would help Google deliver an improved search experience, rather than the “cross our fingers and hope there’s a Web page out there with the answer” solution that currently exists.

So what are your thoughts on the upcoming update to Google’s search engine? Feel free to add a comment to this blog post or contribute to the discussion on Twitter.

For this Wednesdays article I am giving you a great article I found on ReadWriteWeb.com about SEO for your company’s Facebook page. As we all may have noticed now, social media is becoming more popular and also more so integrated into everyday life. Backlinks can be an important part of SEO but they have to be relevant and useful. When you are linking to your site’s content within Facebook status updates, it should be noted, does not help your SEO directly, since these links include the  “nofollow” attribute, they do not count for search ranking purposes. However the links do create more relevant traffic.

Read the original article at http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2011/04/optimize-your-brands-facebook-page-for-search-engines.php

So your company has mastered search engine optimization (SEO) for the brand’s main Website and established a killer social media strategy, both of which are driving hordes of traffic and new business. Way to go. Both are critical to your company’s success online, but have you connected these two very important dots?

If you’re like most major companies, your brand’s Facebook page doesn’t even appear in the first 20 search results for your company on Google, even if your Website does. This is apparently the case for more than 70% of major brands, according to a recent study conducted by SEO services firm BrightEdge.

This is a huge missed opportunity. Although social media may not yet be a significant direct source of revenue, the type of customer engagement it provides is unparalleled. You want people to find your Facebook page and, if appropriate, hit the “Like” button, essentially subscribing themselves to updates and enabling you to keep in touch with them in a way that your Website can’t easily achieve on its own.

Fortunately, optimizing one’s Facebook page for search is pretty simple, and doesn’t require some of the under-the-hood tinkering that standard Website SEO does.

Snag That Vanity URL

Facebook offers brands the opportunity to set up a custom URL (or “username”), which can not only make advertising and word-of-mouth marketing easier (“Check us out at Facebook.com/companyname.”), but also plays a crucial role in SEO.

If you haven’t yet claimed your company’s vanity Facebook URL (you’ll need at least 25 “likes” to be eligible), hop to it. In general, you should go with your company’s name, sticking as close to the original brand as possible.

It’s worth noting that Facebook doesn’t allow dashes or underscore in the vanity URL, so this limits the amount of typical URL keyword trickery you can do. This username cannot be changed, so choose it carefully.

Pay Attention to Your Company’s Name

It may seem obvious, but the name you use in your brand’s Facebook page is really important. Again, sticking to the original brand is important here, as it will help people find you not only via search engines, but on Facebook itself.

You have a little bit of leeway to include keywords in this field but don’t stray too far from the company’s actual name. Don’t worry, there will be other opportunities to get those keywords in.

Fill Out the Company Information, Keywords and All

Facebook gives you three fields to describe your business from a high level: About, Description and General Information. Use them all.

As its smaller size would suggest, the About field is for a shorter, one or two-sentence tagline about your business. Description and General Information give you more space to describe, in concise detail, what the company does. This is an ideal place to include as many relevant keywords as you can.

The more fields under the “Information” tab you can fill out, the better. This will help people find your brand no matter where they’re searching.

Link to It

Let’s not forget that at the heart of Google’s PageRank algorithm still lies the hyperlink. Link to your Facebook page from your main Website and at any other (appropriate) opportunity that arises.

Linking back to your site’s content within Facebook status updates, it should be noted, does not help your SEO directly, since these links include the  “nofollow” attribute, and thus they do not count for search ranking purposes. That said, these links can be a huge source of traffic back to your brand’s site.

More than a month ago now Google released a new search algorithm that changed the SEO world, as of April 11, 2011 it will affect the entire English speaking community. When the first stage of the algorithm was released many sites saw dramatic changes, while others that followed strict guidelines seemed to not be affected. If your SEO efforts are no longer showing any results after the recent algorithm change, then it is likely that your SEO Company is not following the rules.

There are many evolutionary changes being made, such as user feedback that contributes to the algorithm by incorporating data about the sites that users block. This feature may evolve outside of the search engine with the Google Chrome extension that allows users to block sites directly from their browser. Think of both the extension and the search engine feature as having an adverse effect to the Google +1 button; however they do work in many different ways. Keep in mind that Google does collect data from the Personal Block List extension and incorporating the data into the algorithm is very likely because they’ve already compared the data to the sites users have blocked on their search engine.

You may be asking yourself what this might mean for you if you’ve lost traffic recently. This means you simply need to re-evaluate your SEO method and see where you might not be following the rules. Don’t be scared of the change, I say embrace it and take the time to learn something new! If you don’t have the time to learn something new, hire a professional! Here are some articles you may find helpful in researching the changes, and re-evaluating your SEO strategy.

Finding more high-quality sites in search

High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback

Hide sites to find more of what you want

Webmaster Guidelines