cross linking cities?

As far as I know theres no problem about that... Its more like a reciprocal link as the engine sees, not a problem... Incase anyone proves me wrong otherwise...

Thanks Master Bates. But I hope I made it clear that all these city sites all belong to the same company.

If this is the usual crap where only the name of the location changes from site to site, with the rest of the text the same then it's known as "mad-lib" spam.

Cross-linking is only "frowned upon" where it is done for SE purposes only. The line between useful and dubious is a thin one and can depend on your POV.

The content in each city is different, the same kind of content (escort ads) but they are all different from city to city.
Whay say ye?
I appreciate your input.

Also, I am wondering why they would go to the expense of having all these separate websites, when it would be much cheaper and easier to put them all on the same website. I consider them to be very smart people. They are always top dog on Google, and the most successful--by far--in the field of escort directories, so I must believe that they have a good reasons. Any opinion would be sincerely appreciated.

We are just now trying something close to what you are saying, and each city has their own title, description, and keywords that are relevant to that city. The reason is that some users are searching for relevance to "their" city.. example "Dallas Yellow Pages", "Seattle Yellow Pages"... I feel the same would be true with what you are asking about "escorts" because the user would be interested in escorts for their city or where they are traveling.

It is a way to make the search more relevant to the specific city for the user, not to trick the search engines.

This is in Beta for us at this time because we want to see now it is received by the search engines and the users.

You are welcome to look at ours.. dallasweb.com

Best Regards

Dirty Dawg, I am so pleased to have contacted someone who has a direct and personal interest in this topic. Perhaps we can exchange ideas. The site that I am referring to above is
eros.com
If you are interested in exploring this method you should most definitely study Eros. They are absolutely Number 1 among escort directories in terms of sold advertising and always number 1 or 2 on Google when you search on any city's name followed by "escorts". When studying them note that they also have eros-guide.com which is a directory to their various cities which are all separate domains. I am still researching to see if each of their cities has a unique IP.
If you want to visit my site, start at sinfulescorts-usa.com
Compared with Eros, I am strictly small potatos.

Hay Chrishirt, what's POV mean?

Dirty Dawg, in looking at your site it appears that you have not yet placed your various cities on separate domains. They all appear to be on your main site:
dallasweb.com
The same with me; however, I am I am considering doing that--the same way Eros does it.
If you do look over Eros, please get back to me with your thoughts.

POV = Point Of View.

Doing things the same way as Eros does hold some risk that the closed link network will be penalised. The SEs are much quicker on hitting these networks now, The ones that have been around sometime while appearing to be impervious and immune to penalties will at sometime be taken down.
Each of the ones I checked are on individual IPs mostly in the same groups though and there are many hostnames pointing to each of the sites.

For the most part it does seem that the SEs give less regard to tricks and spam methods in the adult web industry. I would assume that is because there is less reliance on free results generally so where operators need results paid advertising is the only way.

Chris, please don't take anything I say here as debating you. I am here hopefully to learn from people like you who abviously have a deeper insight into many of these matters than I do. But I don't want to make a decision that could prove to be a big failure. Nor do I want to avoid making a decision that could prove a big success.
Chris, during many years in a number of kinds of business, I became convinced that innovating on another's success is rarely a bad idea.
There is no other escort directory (and there are a number of them) that can compare--not even close--in size, financial success, or engine ranking to Eros. This has been true for the last four years.
I just find it hard to believe that people smart enough to have attained their kind of success (And, Chris, I'm talking about big, big bucks here!) would at the same time be dumb enough to be make the kind of mistake or run the kind of risk that you suggest. Perhaps, I should mention that although, they are Number 1 on Google, they are nowhere to be found on Yahoo.
With an escort directory, you can't flem-flam your way to success. You have got to deliver clients to the escorts who spend their money advertising on your site. If you can't deliver, forget it. Eros delivers! I want my site to deliver, too. I want to make the big buck, too. I am not in this just to look at pictures of naked girls.
Bottom line question: Are you advising me not to go the way of Eros?

Well ultimately it will be your decision, but in this virtual world, analysing what the competition are doing and then doing exactly the same is not always a recipe for success. More often than not you will simply be throwing money at the problem when another tactic may work better.
When you look deeper into their rankings, yes it works because of Googles over emphasis on external anchor text. This because of their very large cross linked network and every link uses [city/state] Escorts. What they are NOT doing is targetting other phrases. This is where the weakness of the eros strategy is, with the SEs that cannot be "bombed" by anchor text they will not feature very highly.
Try "female escorts", "male escorts", "escort services" (without quotes) Eros do not appear on the first page. These phrases according to WordTracker (paid account not the free results) have more searches that the "[any city] escorts" phrases do.
For now forget what they are doing copying them will only get you frustrated when 2 years down the line you are atill languishing back on page 55 of the results, because Eros are still there and the rest of the competition who are still copying them are still playing catch-up. Be different, think a little past the sides of the box and take a different tack.
While targetting "the big phrase" which often isn't what it seems, target hundreds if not thousands of phrases, while each one may seem relatively insignificant the combination of them all is likely to bring more conversions in any given period than "the big one". You can still target the [city] traffic as well in page titles and allow that to develop while the other phrases bring in results as well.
Do your word research. "escort services" shows 900 searches a day, around 7m raw results with 144k targetted, the highest [city] one (houston escort services) shows 158 searches 2+m results 2k targeted so is not really competitive.
This is where you should concentrate your efforts and this is where on big well designed, well optimised site works far better than the single phrase(s) interlinked network and it will work in ALL search engines not just Google. It will also continue to work through all the updates and algo changes that the SEs throw into the mix. It may take a little longer to get there but it will be there for longer and earning money while it is there. Think user first SE second.

Personally speaking. If I was in the market for an escort and looking, if I landed on your site I wouldn't be staying long. It has all the hallmarks of a average pr0n site with most links opening in new windows. Getting visitors is one thing, keeping them is another.
The eros site by comparison is far better, just one window open and the design doesn't change with every page that opens.
There are a few basic errors on your site as well, you are not consistent with the www and non-www versions and you link to the index page rather than just to the root or directory.

I would suggest that a lot of reading at HighRankings would be beneficial. You won't be able to post links publicly but there are a couple of members who are adult webmasters and SEOs and no shortage of expert members and mods in all areas of SEO and SEM. The same goes for IHY forums Between the two all the information you need will be there for you to read and the huge numbers of myths will get dispelled.
[full disclosure ] I mod at both (not trying to poach members BTW )

Chris:
Wow!
I cannot put in words how much I appreciate your taking the time and efford you expended in advising me. Thank you so much.
I am definitely going to visit the forums that you suggested. However, I have had much more success in getting useful information from non-adult forums. The people on adult forums so often seem more interested in inflating their own egos than in giving advise. And when they do know something "special" I don't think they are as likely to share. That has just been my impression so far. But I will definitely visit the forums you suggest and do the reading that you suggest.
Meanwhile, Chris, is it possible for me to drag you (or anybody who might be interested) into this thing a little further? And round out the picture?
I know I am imposing on you, but please!
In the last year and a half, another escort directory
cityvibe.com
has been steadyly gaining on Eros, and proving to be a strong competitor.
These two are now the only really important escort directories in the business. I am way back at the tail end.
CityVibe.com uses pretty much the same system as Eros, except that they utalize a sub domain for each city rather than an eitirely separate domain and IP as does Eros. Which, of course, means that that they do not have the expense of buying all those domain names. On Google, they rarely rank as well as Eros, (usually second place) but across the span of other engines, they rank very well. They are quite high on Yahoo while Erose is not to be found on Yahoo at all. So what makes for their success?
Chris, if you don't feel like spending any more time on this with me, just blow me off. I will understand and will still appreciate the great advice you have given me so far.
By the way: When potential clients search for an escort, they usually search on a specific city. Examples: "Los Angeles escorts" or "Escorts in Los Angeles", etc.

Be a bit busy for the next couple of days but will be back. The two forums aren't adult based at all, and you won't find too many egos there.

I'm not putting down the importance of [city] searches but there are thousands more phrases that can be targetted while at the same time working on the city ones.
In actual fact many of the [city/state] phrases are low competition and with some work on more than just links could show results.

keyword research files attached from wordtracker. only used one seed word BTW.

back later in the week.