Emperors Club VIP SEO Evaluation and Site Critique

I’m going to sidestep a morality judgment against Eliot Spitzer and his patronage of an elite prostitution agency. This post offers no opinions on the former New York governor in particular or the escort business in general.
Instead I’m interested in the site structure and content of what is now the most famous escort website in the world.

Some interesting facts about the EmperorsClubVip.com website:

• They were hosted at homestead.com
• Employed Google Analytics
• Used Stats from http://www.realtracker.com
• Used javascript to prevent image downloads
• Hid text with javascript

The hosting company is owned by Intuit, an excessively corporate environment with a strict structure who surely was not happy to be connected to this high class escort site.

The most interesting code employed on the Emperors’ website is javascript to hide all text from search engines. If you view the source code the text is all hidden in external javascript files, making the text invisible to most search engine indexers. The text is visible in a search engine cache because the javascript files are kept intact.

Emperors club was not search engine optimized and while the title tags were stuffed with keywords, the main content was intentionally hidden.

This is a paradox: why would the web developers attempt to optimize this site by creating keyword laden titles, but keep content invisible? There is also a very usable sitemap cleanly linking to all the main sub pages. Emperor’s Club VIP was clearly designed to be indexed, but not ranked well.

The site has 147 backlinks as of 3/11 according to yahoo but most of these were generated after the scandal hit. This provides really good data about yahoo indexing and displaying backlinks as it has updated incoming links to EmperorsClubVip.com in less than 2 days. Please Yahoo, if you are acquired my Microsoft, don’t take this link analysis tool away from SEO’s!

They also appear to have had an exclusive link exchange program:

To Advertise your business on our website email: Prices may vary according to the page on which you choose to advertise: Portfolio Page: $15,000 / month Individual model and Concierge pages: $2000 – $8000 / month. Once approved, link exchange is complimentary.

Looking at some of the site content, we find these “models” aren’t cheap
Hourly Rates:

• three diamonds -$1,000
• four diamonds – $1,200
• five diamonds – $1,500
• six diamonds – $2,100
• seven diamonds – $3,100

24- hour Day Rates:

• three diamonds -$10,000
• four diamonds – $12,000
• five diamonds – $15,000
• six diamonds – $21,000
• seven diamonds – $31,000
  multiple -day travel package rates available

This sounds like a salesman at Beverly Hills Rolls Royce:

fees vary according to individual education, sophistication, and ambiance created by each of our models. Choosing from only the most impressive model companion candidates, Emperors Club vip is, by far, the most selective social introduction service available.

Like any conscientious business, they comply with workplace regulations and offer flexible schedules and higher education credits:

With time, promotion, if any, to higher category (ies) is considered and based upon our expanded knowledge of the model’s character and the grace with which she handles public relations / interactions. It is advised to schedule your dates with our models in advance, as each model has place in her schedule for a select number of meetings per month due to her university / career commitments.

See the emperorsclubvip.com prostitution website courtesy of the web archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070824162509/www.emperorsclubvip.com/EmperorsClubVipRates.html

Google Cache (while available)
http://209.85.173.104/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3A
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.emperorsclubvip.com%2FEmperorsClubVipWelcome
X_models_elite_companion_travel_luxury.html

screenshot of the Emperor’s Club website

This search shows 29,000 results, can you guess what the total will be in 1 week? How about 1 month? I predict it will at least quadruple.
Governor Spitzer (client 9) stayed at Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC the night of February 13, 2008, before testifying about the bond industry the next day before Congress where he allegedly met a prostitute from Emperor’s Club escort service.

Final thoughts
Creating an escort website to provide prostitution services is not illegal, but once money changes hands it is illegal. Perhaps unknowingly the escort webmasters and site owners exposed all their clients online identities by using Google Analytics. Google can identify site users through their massive data collection activities, and if the site uses Google Conversion Code they will know if you contacted the site. The escort service has given their personally identifiable information of their clients to Google.

This is one reason not to use free services such as Google Analytics.

At the end of the day this will not diminish prostitution or the sex economy at all. If anything it will likely increase the awareness of online escort services and spur growth in the online paid sex industry. Im sure we will soon see a Client9 movie detailing the investigation process that brought down the New York Governor.