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June 2009
I've finished my semi-annual update of the Top 25 Poker Information Sites.
This month has been notable for much drama concerning the inline link nofollow tag. No other seo tactic has ever created more webmaster
misinformation, bogus assumptions and outright disinformation as what happens if you use nofollow on individual links. At this point, whatever.
All that needs to be known is that adding nofollow on a link causes pagerank to disappear, exactly the same as when you link to a page with
a "index, nofollow" meta tag. Nofollow has plenty of good, practical uses, but reassigning pagerank is not one of them.
May 2009
A few days ago Full Tilt Poker changed the design of its website. From an SEO perspective, the change seems to be strictly
design/color changes that likely won't have any impact on anything. However, it is not a sure thing than Google will logically ignore
sitewide changes (like changing from one color to another) that should have no effect on ranking. Likewise, there is also no guarantee
that a sitewide change will have been done correctly on every page of the domain. So, any changes that occur to Full Tilt's rankings
this month would be interesting to see.
Complicating the above situation though is what appears to be two basic sets of results. One is the basic structure of results that
has been the status quo for quite some time. The other is significantly different. Most obviously in these results, poker.com drops
from #1 for a [poker] search, and (the now obsolete) PokerRoom.com jumps to #2. Since Google may be tweaking its algorithm
significantly this month, it will be harder to judge and positive or negative impact due to Full Tilt's change.
April 2009
April and the first half of May are traditionally relatively slow months for online poker. No doubt this is partly due to spring
coming to the Northern Hemisphere and the corresponding desire to spend more time outdoors. At the same time, a large percentage of
promotions of online poker sites, both cardrooms and information sites, turns to promoting World Series of Poker qualifying
satellites. While these satellites are popular with experienced players, they are little interest to established players who can't or
don't want to make the journey to Las Vegas for the main event, and more crucially, they are of zero interest to brand new players who
care about more mundane things finding out if a flush beats a straight. While player numbers at online cardrooms are up overall by a
lot over a year ago, the seasonal dip has returned once again. It seems a challenge to do, but perhaps one of these years during April
and May a cardroom will learn to focus internal promotions (ones on the game client) towards the WSOP, while focusing online marketing
away from the WSOP.
This month's key search development is the return of the index page of Pokernews.com to the [poker] search results. The Pokernews main
page has been filtered from these results for a long time, at least a year and maybe much longer if memory serves me correctly. When
doing specific types of searches that show un-filtered Google results, the Pokernews main page has been there all along ranking
between #15 and #40, but it has been filtered out (removed) from the main Google results that get displayed -- even though pages from
the rest of the domain seem to rank normally. This could have been occurring due to long-lasting negative scoring against the domain from
when Pokernews was much spammier than it is today. It could also be due to how Pokernews serves content on the main page. In any case,
it is an interesting change, even if its current 30ish ranking for a [poker] search won't bring it any significant increase in traffic.
March 2009
This month Google, MSN and Yahoo introduced a new meta tag aimed at helping sort through duplicate content on websites to find the
"canonical" content/page/url. Poorly constructed websites will usually generate numerous distinct URLs offering the
same content, like example.com, www.example.com, and www.example.com/?1234 may all show the exact same content. This phenomenon can usually
be addressed, with Google, by making 301 redirects so that unique content can be displayed on only one URL. A problem with using 301s
though is the stone-age search engines, MSN and Yahoo, handle them very poorly, especially MSN.
The engines now offer an additional, or alternate way, to tell the engines which URL to index (and thus which copies to ignore).
The tag goes between the head tags and looks like:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page.html" />
So far I have not found this tag to be of any use in helping MSN or Yahoo in figuring out that a 301 redirect does in fact mean a page
has moved permanently to a new URL, but perhaps after a few weeks they will figure it out.
In my view this tag is no replacement for building a website right in the first place, but it could possibly be helpful in some
limited situations -- and it could be quite helpful if MSN and Yahoo do pay attention to it eventually, as they have said they will.
February 2009
In what could be the second most significant development in the history of search (after the founding of Google), February 3rd-4th Google tested
its "Ajax" results display. The Ajax results prevent webmasters and statistics programs from tracking what search queries bring
a visitor to a website. This change would have a monumental impact on Internet commerce, and in particular make it much harder for anyone
new to break into a competitive niche like poker.
In the past after typing a query into Google you would get a results page with a URL like:
http://www.google.com/search?q=poker
In contrast the Ajax results present a URL like:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=poker&aq=f&oq=poker&fp=3WTwdsC3GPc
Statistics programs get their search term data from the URL of the referring page. In the first example, the stats program would see the word
"poker" and then record in your web stats that the visitor came via a search for [poker]. While the second result also has the word
"poker" in it, notice that it comes after the "#" in the URL. This is a problem because statistics programs can not read
anything after a "#" in a URL! So the stats program then will not be able to tell you what the query was that brought the visitor to
your site. A stats program will only be able to tell you the referrer came from google.com. In fact, the stats program should report
simply that the visitor came from www.google.com -- the root URL, as if you had a link on the main page of the Google website.
So, when Ajax is in use you will still see traffic coming from Google, but you won't know if the visitor is coming for [play online poker] or [poker flat
arctic research].
They may discard it five seconds from now and we'll never hear about it again, but the ramifications of this would be far-reaching if Google rolls
it out permanently.
January 2009
There are updated traffic numbers for the top 25 most trafficked poker information sites
as of the beginning of 2009.
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