Getting a new adult site indexed, from Search Console to SafeSearch

A new adult site has two problems a new recipe blog doesn't. Google is careful with it from the first crawl, and most of the people who'd search for it have SafeSearch somewhere between them and your pages. Neither is a reason to panic, and both have documented answers. What follows is the order we'd do things in on a fresh domain, with Google's own pages linked so you can check us.

Day one, before anything else

Verify the domain in Search Console. Use the domain property (the DNS record kind) rather than a URL prefix if your registrar lets you, since it covers http, https, www and every subdomain in one go. It costs five minutes and it's the only place Google tells you what it thinks of your site.

Then check the boring stuff that silently kills indexing. The site answers on one canonical host, and the other variants (www or not, http) redirect to it permanently. Robots.txt doesn't block anything you want crawled. No leftover noindex from the staging days. Every page carries a canonical tag pointing at itself on the right host. On a platform migration it's the leftover noindex that bites most often, on a new site it's usually the host mix-up.

The age gate has to let Googlebot in

This is the one that's specific to adult, and it's in Google's own guidance for explicit sites. Google asks you to "allow Googlebot to crawl your content without triggering the age gate". A gate that replaces the page with a "are you 18" screen for every visitor, crawlers included, gives Google an empty page to index. Rankings suffer, and Google warns it may classify the whole site as explicit to be safe.

A common fix is a gate that overlays the page for humans while the content is still in the HTML, so a crawler reads the page and a visitor sees the question first. Whatever your approach, check with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console that the rendered page Google sees has your content in it, not the gate.

That guidance also asks you to let Googlebot fetch your video files so it can understand what's in them. On an embed tube the video is at the source, so that part is mostly the source's business, but your thumbnails and your text are yours.

SafeSearch, and why it's fine

SafeSearch filters explicit results for users who have it on. Adult sites get filtered, that's the point of it, and fighting it is pointless. What you can control is being classified correctly, so your pages show fully to people with SafeSearch off, and that the non-explicit parts of a mixed site aren't dragged in with the rest.

On the mechanics, Google is clear. Mark explicit pages with <meta name="rating" content="adult">, or the equivalent HTTP header. If some of your site isn't explicit (a blog about the business, a tools section), keep the explicit pages on their own domain or subdomain so the classifier doesn't have to guess page by page. And if a page is misclassified either way, the same guide links to a troubleshooting page.

For a site that's adult from top to bottom, the rating tag on every page is honest and it helps. For a site like jimp.io, which talks about adult sites but isn't one, keeping explicit images out of the markup, or blurred behind a click, is what keeps it out of the filter.

Sitemaps, and what Google does with them

Google's sitemap documentation is short and settles a few old arguments. A single sitemap holds up to 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed, beyond that you split into several with an index. Google "ignores <priority> and <changefreq> values", so don't waste time tuning them. It uses <lastmod> only when it's "consistently and verifiably accurate", so a lastmod that changes on every page every day, because your template prints today's date, is worse than none.

Submit the sitemap in Search Console and add a Sitemap line in robots.txt. Then leave it alone and watch the report. The number that matters isn't how many URLs you submitted, it's how many ended up indexed.

Crawl budget on a young domain

Crawl budget has its own page, and Google says it's written for large sites, a million pages or more, or ten thousand and up with content changing daily. A tube with ten thousand videos published at once falls in the second group on day one, on a domain with no history. That's a lot of pages for a site Google has no reason yet to crawl hard.

The same page explains that crawl demand depends on a site's size, how often it changes, and its quality and relevance compared to other sites. A new domain has nothing to show on the last two. So the pages beyond what Google is willing to fetch pile up in "Discovered, currently not indexed", and a site that's mostly unindexed pages is judged on that.

Our view, which we argued in more detail in Ten thousand pages on day one, is to publish at a pace the crawler can keep up with. A first batch spread over the previous weeks, then a steady number of new pages every day. Each crawl finds something new, the share of indexed pages stays high, and the budget grows with the site instead of being wasted on a backlog.

Reading the first weeks

In the Pages report, the ratio between indexed and not indexed tells you more than any single number. On a healthy launch, new pages get indexed within a few days of going live and the "not indexed" pile doesn't grow faster than the site does.

"Crawled, currently not indexed" is Google telling you it read the page and didn't think it was worth keeping. On a tube that's almost always duplicate text, the feed's title and description that a hundred other sites carry. Rewrite them. "Discovered, currently not indexed" means Google knows the URL and hasn't got round to it, which on a young site usually means you published faster than it crawls. Slow down rather than push harder.

The Crawl stats report, under Settings, shows fetches per day. On a site that's doing well that line climbs month over month. If it's flat while you keep publishing, the queue is growing.

URL Inspection is your best friend for single pages. Test the live URL, look at the rendered HTML and the screenshot, and you'll see what Google sees, age gate and all. Requesting indexing works for a handful of important pages, not for thousands.

Links, briefly

Without links pointing at it, a new domain is slow to earn crawl demand, and adult sites have fewer places to get links than most. Buying them is against Google's policies and against this forum's rules, so we won't go there. Real mentions from forums you actually take part in, from directories that review sites, and from your own other sites where it makes sense for a visitor, are slow but they count. A visitor trade that runs through nofollow redirects brings people, not ranking signals, and that's fine as long as you know which is which.

On a Jimp site

Disclosure, the part about us. Jimp sites generate their sitemap at /sitemap.xml on the site's canonical address and list it in robots.txt, carry a canonical tag on every page, and pass crawlers past the age gate with the content in the HTML. The publishing pace is fixed per site type, for the reasons above. What you still do yourself is verify the domain in Search Console and submit the sitemap, which takes a few minutes. The publishing and SEO page has the rest.

If your site sits at a few dozen indexed pages after a month, post the Pages report numbers here, no domain needed, and we'll look at it with you.