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May 2008
There are updated traffic numbers for the top 25 most trafficked poker information sites.
April 2008
Google has its first major mucked up update of the year. Check out this search for
[poker sites]. As I type this
there are five cloaked/redirecting/blog-comment-reliant garbage root domains in the top ten. All are titled similarly, like
"Poker Sites Top Rated Poker Sites". The next ten again has about five more. This sort of trivial fluff hasn't ranked well
for quite some time, especially fluff that is built on extremely bad quality links. It seems Google was unprepared for this
phenomenon, but it also seems as if a few algorithm items simply weren't added to the mix. It's like half the results are
from 2008 while half are from AltaVista 2001.
March 2008
Last year their was a small hubbub in some non-poker SEO circles that betrayed a very uninformed view of the poker niche.
Essentially some folks wondered if it was possible to succeed in the poker niche if you did not use blackhat/spam tactics.
This is quite funny since when it comes to Google blackhat sites and tactics have almost zero success in the poker niche --
unless you count the Pokerlistings.com network of sites buying links from just about every remotely on topic website they
can find. While Pokerlistings.com's link-buying is successful, more traditional blackhat tactics fail miserably, in general.
So last year's hubbub was exactly backwards.
Buying expired domains is not a blackhat tactic, but obviously it isn't a quality-based action either. Currently a former
government domain (now with some very slim poker content on it)
ranks #16 for a [poker] search.
Obviously from a quality standpoint it does not deserve that ranking. Let's see how long it can hold on to that ranking.
February 2008
Microsoft has made a $44 billion offer for Yahoo. Viewed strictly from a search perspective, this would be the #2 and #3
sites getting together to battle the #1, but it's not really that simple. Yahoo's search engine (and I use that term
charitably) is the bastard child of several even worse search engines (Inktomi, Alta Vista..) that it bought and cobbled
together to make the inferior product they market today. Microsoft in contrast built a poor quality search engine from
scratch. The best thing one can say about MSN's search engine is that it is far better than Yahoo's. Combining the two would
be to continue Yahoo's fool's errand of trying to make something good out of a bunch of rotten pieces. If post-merger Microsoft
did anything but completely eliminate Yahoo's current product, they would be lowering the value of their product considerably.
Yahoo has a far superior ad service, the old Overture product, and that is where the money is in search, so a move of using
Overture, over the MSN search results, on two of the top three most trafficked websites on the Internet, plus multiple other
smaller ones would raise the value of the two entities over what it is now. But sadly for those involved, their history of
extraordinarily inept decisions in terms of search could well mean they choose a different path, like using the spam-infested
Yahoo free results. Doing that could open up the search area to either near total domination by Google, or remotely possibly,
an as yet unknown genuine competitor for Google.
January 2008
I've finished the tedious task of tabulating the top 25 most trafficked poker information sites
for the end of 2007 according to Hitwise, Quantcast and Compete.com. All the numbers are ONLY for United States traffic. All three of these sites provide
useful data, but are flawed. (Alexa in contrast is just junk information.) Still, the flaws are consistent for everyone so the numbers are pretty good for
ballpark estimating.
The Hitwise numbers are for the entire year of 2007. This information is not all that accurate as they don't provide such data directly, but rather
only offer site comparisons on a monthly basis, and then relative only to the universe of that month. In other words, Site A might have 18% more
traffic than Site B in February, and site B might have 11% more traffic than Site A in July, but if there is 60% more poker traffic overall in July,
comparing the numbers is somewhat comparing apples to oranges.
So on the list no doubt the difference between #22 and #23 is meaningless, but a few facts are clear. The most important is that the top 14 sites had
significantly more traffic than those below. So, all sites listed below Pokernews.com are in a second group traffic-wise. And, it is also true that
all sites not listed fall significantly below the second group listed (including the few sites I listed below the top 25 that are pretty close to #25,
but well ahead of anything #30 or lower).
As a reminder, Hitwise tracks "visits" to a site, not "visitors", so a single person could be counted a dozen
or more times a day. In contrast, Quantcast and Compete only count one person per MONTH, so they are very different, with Hitwise
favoring forums over news sites that are updated daily and very much favoring both over static-ish information sites.
The
Quantcast and Compete numbers are just for December, but they have very nice graphs showing traffic either for the previous
year (Compete) or six months (Quantcast). Quantcast has a lot of other very nice data too, although some of it is consistently
skewed because of the nature of the poker industry. For example, the percentage of Asians interested in poker is drastically above
the national average for poker, which has Quantcast making rather absurd assumptions about percentage of Asian traffic to all the poker sites.
Archive of posts from 2007 |
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