I can't find a link to this video right now, but I know last year Matt Cutts posted a Webmaster Central video responding to questions about how Google treated adult websites in its algorithms. Matt stated that they don't treat adult websites any differently at all in their algorithms.

He did admit that he thought doing good white-hat SEO for them is much harder than other verticals however because many websites and properties will not be thrilled to link to adult websites, and so linkbuilding and getting exposure can be harder if you don't have a good network, but that there was nothing algorithmically against you.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me - I can't think of why they would arbitrarily penalize such a large category on the web, other than it's hard to do whitehat work for them. It sounds like you have the right tactics down already though.

I got a great question from a franchise owner today regarding Google Places for his business. His businesses are all in malls.

With Google Places there is an emphasis on using consistency and full contact details, as we well know. The issue is his locations are in a mall and don't have a physical address to receive mail or verify their address. Is there a way to leverage Google Places in this kind of situation, or do you just use the general mall address?

We've had some pretty good success in beating exact match and partial match domains in the SERPs. I don't think I could attribute it back to any one thing that we did, but here is something that we did:

We aggressively pursued many exact-match or near-exact anchor text links from a number of websites directly to the page we wanted to rank. Your link profile may already be stronger than theirs, but it needs to be even stronger. This is pretty tough - When I look at our stats vs the exact match domains that are still page 1 but now lower on page 1, they have very few inbound links. Below is a screenshot from page 1 of Google for "marketing automation".

I know OSE hasn't crawled a lot of inbound links for this page or some of our competitors, but you can see the rough impact. We have a DA of 86. They have an 11. You might not think they would even be in the same ballpark as the other domains ranking for this term, but Google loves exact match domains, at least for now.

AQfsB