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 PartyPoker.com
almost certainly holds the distinction for being hit with the most costly search engine penalty in Internet history.
From spring 2004 until literally 36 hours before Party Gaming went public in June 2005, Party Poker had a 100% Google death penalty
against it. The domain could not be found for any search of any kind on Google. Considering this was the absolute peak of
the poker boom, and that Party at the time was the largest card room by far and that it was spending tens of millions of dollars in
advertising, and considering they had a top three ranking for a [poker] search before the penalty... considering all these factors,
the loss of all search engine traffic cost Party at least one hundred million dollars. They lost free traffic from all manner of search
terms, but they also even lost the ability to be found for their own name, leading to a situation where they had to pay affiliates
every time someone typed anything related to the company into a search box.
The company's own spamming, their tolerance of mega-spamming affiliates, and their inept web design all contributed to the
most colossal blunder in the history of Internet marketing. Even years later the company has not recovered its previous
search positions. Black hat SEO is always less profitable even in the medium-run for real businesses, but you don't have to
look any further than Party Poker to see how "going black hat" is suicidal for companies that actually have a product
people want. Party's fiasco is not the only reason black hats have largely failed to get a meaningful share of the poker search
marketplace, but if nothing else it should be a warning signal to all the cardrooms looking to black hat to catch up with
the major companies. You can survive losing all your search positions -- if you have tens of millions of dollars to spend on
television ads, and networks willing to take those ad dollars. If you don't have that, good luck staying in business.
One other important point to emphasize regarding Party's death sentence: it underscored the importance of having some
emergency backup. That is, if your primary domain loses all its rankings, you better have at least one secondary site that
can pick up some of the slack. Most of the cardrooms now have .net sites that can do that. |
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