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December 30, 2007
While the week between Christmas and New Years Day tend to be "off" times for most people and businesses, this is not
the case in the poker world. In fact, aside from the peak times when the World Series of Poker is underway, this time at the
end of the year is the busiest time for both online poker cardrooms and poker information sites in terms of traffic.
Part of the reason is more people are at home because they are off work, and the weather tends to keep them inside. But also,
ESPN and the other TV networks load up the days with repeats of the WSOP and other poker tournaments. There simply is no other
time when poker in general (meaning not the news of the final day of the WSOP) is the focus of so much major media attention.
So it's no surprise that PokerStars, the largest
online poker card room, set a record this past week by having more than 20,000 players playing
ring game poker at the same time.
Prior to the passage of the UIGEA,
the largest cardroom at the time, PartyPoker, never
had more than 17,000 simultaneous ring game players. Even more remarkable than this milestone though, within 24 hours of breaking
20,000 ring game players for the first time, they surpassed 22,000 players! A ten percent increase in the record literally overnight.
So, if you run a poker site, be on your toes during the World Series of Poker, but don't forget the last week of the year.
December 10, 2007
According to Lycos.com, for the second year in a row, [poker]
is the most popular search term in the galaxy, more popular than [my space], [Britney Spears] and [Paris Hilton]. While the
Lycos news isn't the same as Google releasing is raw search data, this news shows poker continues to be a phenomenon like no
other.
And the news also makes one wonder while so few people who know what they are doing are working in the poker niche.
November 27, 2007
One of the challenges facing poker search marketers these days is Google's dramatically slowed down crawl priorities.
Previously most sites that were PR4 or higher could count on getting a thorough crawl once a month. The most powerful poker
sites could get large crawls every day. Now it is sadly common to find well-linked pages on sites Google likes (meaning it
ranks pages from the domain decently) not having been crawled in over four months. These pages are not even in the trash bin
Google calls its "supplemental" index. These are pages that rank well for their targeted search terms.
I've been watching a page on a site that has targeted a different variation of a search term. The focus of the page is
basically similar but different words are now more appropriate -- like Full Tilt Poker now has referral codes rather than
bonus codes -- so the text on the page has been altered to reflect this new reality. But unfortunately for this site, weeks
have passed and the page has not been crawled. It will be crawled again eventually, but a clear lesson of the new Google is
not just to get pages up as soon as they are done, but to get them up "right". The additional possibility that it may
now be better to not reuse old URLs for slightly altered content would seem to not yet be true, but if this weak crawl phenomenon
continues, it may one day make sense.
November 12, 2007
The owners of FullTilt.com, an enterprise product information management company has decided they no longer want to own a
similar domain name to a far more profitable company. FullTilt.com gets about 2000 typo visitors a day who are looking for
FullTiltPoker.com. That's a lot of traffic not being put to profitable use. So, FullTilt.com is now up for sale. They hope
for a seven figure sale. The problem with this though is (aside from Full Tilt Poker buying it themselves) affiliates are
usually prohibited from using brand names in in domain names -- and regardless of what the Full Tilt Poker terms say now,
such a change in the future is always a possibility. So anyone besides the cardroom buying this domain would be taking a
significant risk... unless of course they use the FullTilt.com domain to direct traffic to a poker site other than
FullTiltPoker.com.
November 5, 2007
After a month or so of settling down into a pretty reasonable group of results, the one one word [poker] search results have
once again gone completely apeshit. For example the completely useless random text domain 1cardgamepoker.com is in the top
five. A 100% useless spam domain with random text should never be able to crack the top 20, let alone the top five. Whatever
switch you flipped in the past 48 hours Google, very lame.
October 29, 2007
Google updated its display of toolbar pagerank over the weekend. Since Google's inception, pagerank has been a cornerstone
of its results ranking algorithm, and, despite the fairly complex formula behind it, is one of the simplest things to
understand when it comes to search marketing. Put most basically, getting both quality links and a quantity of links helps
you rank better. Very generally, higher pagerank means that somewhere along the way other sites that have a good number of
good quality sites linking to them are linking to you. Pagerank has always simply been an expression of link power.
Google has now changed that by adjusting toolbar pagerank under certain circumstances so that the display reflects a number
that is not purely mathematical. Index pages for new sites have often had an arbitrarily lower pagerank displayed than they
deserved. On top of that now, Google is subtracting one or more pagerank levels from some sites it believes sell links as a
means to deceive Google about the real value of websites.
In addition to this, the toolbar display itself is normally woefully out of date, by design. Previously Google updated
pagerank about once a month. The most recent update took more than half a year. The result of this is a lot of novice
webmasters get confused about pagerank, to the benefit of more experienced webmasters.
Pagerank is still extremely important, but the toolbar display is of very little value. Link power is still the cornerstone
of Google's ranking algorithm, and link power is what pagerank is. Pagerank is not the green pixel display on the toolbar.
That is just an inaccurate, out of date approximation of pagerank at a certain moment in time (in this case, October 2,
2007).
October 16, 2007
Without regard for my life and sanity I decided to check out the MSN search results today. Two things are clear... Yahoo is
now far and away the worst of the three search engines, and MSN has improved greatly even though it still has all manner of
massive problems, most notably not indexing some major domains and often not ranking the proper page for a search query. For
example, if a website has a poker rules section linked throughout the site, you would expect that page to appear for a
[poker rules] search, not a sub page focusing on draw poker rules that may only be linked from that main poker rules index
page. Part of this problem it seems to be due to MSN's continuing inability to handle 301 redirects. This can be seen by
doing a [site:] search for a domain, where often the main page of the domain is not displayed first (or at all). As a
webmaster MSN is very frustrating since you just want to say "stop being such a moron". But sadly you can't do
anything about how stupid MSN is, at least not without endangering your far more important Google positions by removing
301s.
September 30, 2007
I updated the Top 25 Poker Information Sites list to include
the latest monthly Compete.com numbers as well as those for the past year. Interestingly no new site was able to join the
yearly list (an average of US monthly unique visitors for the past twelve months), even though two sites,
Pokerplayernewspaper.com and Learn-texas-holdem.com had dramatic drops in uniques since June when I last updated the
numbers. Three new sites did however leap onto the monthly list.
One thing to note is that Poker.about.com is not trackable on Compete.com because unlike Quantcast.com it doesn't track
subdomains separately. It would likely make the top five like it does on Quantcast list if it could be tracked.
September 17, 2007
While I was out of town for a few days, the new Quantcast.com and Compete.com monthly traffic numbers were released. I have
updated the Top 25 sites list with the new
Quantcast numbers. (I'll get to the Compete.com later this month.) There was quite a bit of movement since I did
the list with the June numbers. One change is predictable: the significant drop for World Series of Poker news sites. When
the event was in progress these sites, most obviously Worldseriesofpoker.com, had a large traffic spike. The numbers
from August (the event ended in July) should reflect more accurate "normality".
Five sites dropped out of the top 25: Learn-texas-holdem.com (a very large drop attributable to a loss of its excellent
rankings for Texas Holdem searches), Pokerplayernewspaper.com (another huge drop), Pokersourceonline.com, Pocketfives.com
and Tightpoker.com (the latter two both owned by Poker Source Online). Apparently something in the Poker Source Online
network caused a drop in traffic for all their sites. The five sites joining the top 25 include three veteran sites that
have long been in the top 25: Pokertips.org, Homepokergames.com and Thepokerforum.com. The other two new sites squeaked in
at #24 and #25, Pokerjunkie.com and Compatiblepoker.com -- both of which were just below the top 25 previously, so the
significant drop of the sites falling out is more responsible for them joining rather than large traffic increases of their own.
September 6, 2007
Hitwise traffic rankings for August show an expected plummet for Worldseriesofpoker.com, from #1 to #12. Pokernews.com went
to #14 from #7, similar to its #15 rank in May, before the World Series. Neverwinpoker.com stabilizes at #16 for the second
month in a row (in contrast to being #45 in May), so its purchase by Pokernews.com seems to have been good for it. One
bizarre item worth mention is Sportingbet's popular Pokertop10.com continues to receive a smattering of visitors despite it
strangely being offline for more than a month. It really makes no sense for a domain with a half decade of popularity and
top 100 rankings for a [poker] search to just lay dormant this long. Even if they intend to replace the content with
something else, it doesn't make sense to take down a good performing domain to replace it with a one page under construction
page. It's not like Sportingbet has had a great year(!), where they can just set fire to a domain worth five figures (even
now I mean) -- especially considering if nothing else they could easily find a buyer for it.
This past week, in a development worth tens of millions of dollars, Bodog (now known Prince-like as "the company formerly
known as Bodog") lost control of its flagship domain as well as some related domains like Calvinayre.com. While they have
moved operations to Newbodog.com and (less than creatively) Newcalvinayre.com, their search rankings likely will take months
or more to follow. A search for [bodog] on Google today brings up a Vegasinsider.com URL, which redirects to Newbodog.com --
which is in itself a spammy act that could get Bodog in further search trouble. Fortunately for Bodog, a Wikipedia article
is #2, and that does legitimately link to the new, correct URL. Still, Bodog has gone from a top ten ranking for poker to
(as far as I can see) to not being into the top 1000.
August 26, 2007
Feeling masochistic, I decided to check Yahoo's [free online poker] results (two other examples are linked below. I don't
even have the heart to create a new screenshot, since I've embarrassed Yahoo enough lately... but my goodness, what a pile
of junk. In addition to the hijacked/redirect domains, groups.google.com and spaces.msn.com results which are 100% useless,
now Yahoo has decided to add garbage myspace.com URLs to the mix. The top 100 doesn't even include a dozen results that are
from genuine domains.
August 16, 2007
The dog days of summer continue. The status quo reigns in poker search areas, with Google's one word [poker] results all
over the place the only thing really markedly different each day (in fact, multiple times a day). Also notable in the Google
results is how it is now far more common for people to see significantly different results for the same query. A page at #41
on my computer in California was in the 50s on Randy Ray's in
Texas. Google has dozens of datacenters that have slightly different data, but for months now the datacenter results have
had no direct connection to results displayed. Previously, results displayed on one datacenter or another would be served up
to different users, so results would differ from computer to computer in that way, but after direct access to results from
datacenters was discarded (apparently for some secret sauce blend), the results were generally consistent for one user to
the next. But no more.
This week's Hitwise traffic data illustrates the popularity of player stat sites -- not particular in general, but with
obsessive return visitors. In addition to Sharkscope.com coming in its usual #3 slot, Officialpokerrankings.com now seems to
be a fixture in the top 20. Official Poker Rankings still falls short of the Compete.com and Quantcast rankings (which only
count a visitor once a month), but clearly these stat sites can achieve a large level of niche popularity.
August 8, 2007
The July Quantcast and Compete.com traffic numbers should be out in a day or two, but the weekly Hitwise numbers are
interesting to look at in light of the World Series of Poker being over (though now televised each week by ESPN). Some sites
like Worldseriesofpoker.com and Pokernews.com show a predictable large drop in visits relative to other poker sites, while
playing-focused sites like Playwinningpoker.com and Pokersourceonline.com show a significant increase in their share of the
player traffic. Neverwinpoker.com shows an increase while Fullcontactpoker.com shows a large decrease for some reason.
Pokerjunkie.com and Pokerworks.com show a drop even though they are both (implausibly) currently in Google's top ten for a
[poker] search.
The most interesting development is Learn-texas-holdem.com's nosedive after losing its top spots for Texas holdem searches.
The domain has not gotten a 950 penalty, but simply has dropped down about 70 results. It may be temporary, but perhaps the
ultra-spammy link buys Poker Listings has done involving the domain have seriously wounded it. If this is the case, is it a
sign of things to come, or just an anomaly?
August 3, 2007
The dog days of summer in the search world... Google's one-word searches still bounce around like a whirling dervish and 950
penalties still being applied foolishly, but despite those two things Google's results overall very good; Yahoo does an
update that improves its sorry results but still they are generally pathetic as represented again (see June 27 below) by a
[free poker online] search; MSN
continues to be somewhere in the middle, but filled with weirdo problems like often (even usually) not ranking the most
appropriate page from a domain for a search. I suppose the status quo we have here are three public companies who don't want
to do anything to rock the boat -- Google is flush from the lack of any serious competition; every time Yahoo does anything
they risk getting even worse; MSN knows they stink so they have given up trying and just hold their small market share while
trying to save face. It seems likely that never in the history of business has an economic niche been so ripe for fresh
blood, and been so unlikely to get it.
July 27, 2007
A thread on
Poker Affiliate World discusses the recent purchase of Neverwinpoker.com by Pokernews.com. Tony of Poker News told me
last month this may be in the cards, and I've given it more than a little thought since. While Never Win sits on the cusp of
the top 25 poker information sites on Hitwise (moving between #46 in May to #25 in June), it's not close to the top 25 on
Compete.com and Quantcast (which shows 73% of its visitors each month are regulars). As usual, this reflects how Hitwise
counts raw visits and the other two count monthly unique visitors.
In any case Neverwinpoker.com has decent traffic and regular visitors, as will as 16k pages indexed by Google, so it should
bring significant value to the Poker News network of sites. There is no reasonably successful poker site that caters to a
more immature audience, but even considering that it can help Poker News SEO-wise, if Poker News uses it that way. The
reverse would be deadly though... Poker News needs to take care that the high quality reputation of Pokernews.com and
Pokerworks.com are not harmed by the juvenile tone found on Never Win Poker. (Pocketfives.com would have been a better
match, if more expensive.)
Beanie makes an interesting post on his
Always Bluff
blog, pointing out the rather extreme hypocrisy of what topics Google does and does not allow Adwords to appear on. Google
also continues to allow sites like Topix.net/games/poker to blatantly violate their Adsense policy by running Adsense on
pages that have gambling content as well as links to online gambling sites. If Google wants to ban Adsense on gambling
sites, fine, but allowing rogues sites like Topix.net to "wink wink" break the rules is absurdly hypocritical,
and "do evil" unfair to boot.
July 18, 2007
Times do change. Four years ago after Chris
Moneymaker changed the poker forever only two websites, Poker-babes.com and Poker-king.com, targeted his name to any
degree as a valuable search term. In retrospect, this is remarkable. Everyone except two sites more or less ignored a couple
hundred highly targeted searchers each day. (I can be confident that no one else was targeting the name seriously since
Playwinningpoker.com normally ranked #3 for his name, it was only mentioned in passing on a page about something else.)
Fast forward to Jerry Yang's victory at the 2007
WSOP. Dozens of poker sites had pages up on Yang well before he won the event. Webmasters now "get" that poker players
get searched for. The joke though is this year it really doesn't matter much. It's unlikely that any poker sites will break into
the top 10 for a [jerry yang] search since that also happens to be the name of the founder of Yahoo.com. It's like a person
named George Bush winning.
I have not commented on it lately, because it is beating a dead horse, but the Google one word [poker] results continue to
change multiple times a day -- each version just a screwily bad as the other. Pokerjunkie.com and Pokersbest.net in the top
10? Junkie should be in the mid to lower reaches of the top 100, but Pokersbest.net doesn't even merit being in the top 10,000.
July 12, 2007
I've updated the Top 25 Poker Information Sites with the new Compete.com unique visitor numbers. I changed the Compete.com part
of the page to include both its numbers from the previous month and an average for the previous year. The most notable thing
about comparing these numbers is the large drop in visitors to Poker.net. Their yearly average is about 32,000 unique visitors
a month, while June only showed 11,500. Other sites on a downward arc are Texasholdem-poker.com and Worldpokertour.com --
not a great thing when you are launching a cardroom. By the way, for those who care, I won't be including the World Poker Tour
site in the future now that they are launching a cardroom, assuming the cardroom doesn't totally stiff as the previous one did.
Sites on the upswing include Twoplustwo.com and Thehendonmob.com. Poker.com seems to have found its post-cardroom level at about 40,000 uniques a month.
The one thing to not pay much attention to is the seasonal spike for Worldseriesofpoker.com in June (the event started in
June and is still underway this month).
I've also expanded the lists a bit to include more data on sites in the 26-30 range that pop onto only one or the other of
the top 25 lists. Altogether the lists now offer quite a bit of good detail for comparing websites to another, and to themselves.
June 11, 2007
The June Quantcast.com and Compete.com website traffic numbers are out. I've updated the Quantcast list on the
Top 25 page. Notable changes include (not surprisingly)
Worldseriesofpoker.com passing Playwinningpoker.com as the site with the most unique visitors for June. Playwinningpoker.com
increases about 12%, while Pokerlistings.com doubles its May numbers to come in third. Then there is a small drop to Cardplayer.com
and Poker.com. Poker.about.com enters the Quantcast top 25 at number six, and Thehendonmob.com joins at number nine below
Worldpokertour.com. Twoplustwo.com, the number 10 site, registers less than half the unique visitors of the top five sites.
The sites in the bottom half of the top 25 jostle around a bit. Tightpoker.com also joins the list, while Thepokerforum.com,
Pokertips.org and Homepokergames.com drop off. Full Contact Poker also falls short.
July 7, 2007
I know it's beating a dead horse by now, but Google's one word [poker]
search today has Poker.about.com at #3. The retching sound you hear will be me if this mediocre, ad-soaked domain
makes it to #1.
July 2, 2007
The Hitwise stats for June show a predictable boost in visits for Worldseriesofpoker.com and the news-oriented poker sites
relative to forums and strategy sites, except for Bluffmagazine.com, which shows a significant downward movement. Hitwise
measures return visitors, so a person checking WSOP results could be counted up to four dozen times in a day, which isn't a
particularly helpful statistic, but given that Bluff got the exclusive rights to WSOP updates (which they farmed out to
Pokernews.com for the actual reporting), it seems odd Bluff has gotten no apparent traffic benefit from the deal. (It
appears likely from the data that visits actually went down in June.) Of course, it's possible they made a profit
simply from buying the rights from Harrah's then making a second deal with Poker News, but regardless, the 2007 WSOP has not
put Bluff more "on the map".
On the cardroom side of things, Hitwise shows a drop in visits to PokerStars.com in June but little else of note.
June 27, 2007
You ever wonder what the Internet would be like without search engines to direct people around? Well, look no further than
Yahoo. Actually I better warn you. The search I am posting here might make you go blind, give up the Internet, and send you
to the hospital with uncontrollable giggles. One more thing before you look, this search is not an obscure one. It is one
done by many people each day. Now that you are ready for the carnage, check out
[free poker online]. If you can still
read after looking at that mess of dung, imagine me taking a look at this search and then having to make the screenshot bigger
to accommodate the ungodly mess that just keeps going on and on and on. In the top 28 results, the Wikipedia comes in at #15
and there are two pages from Party Poker after that. EVERY SINGLE ONE of the rest of the top 28 results is pure spam,
almost all are either a hijack/redirect or a blog page that was set up to be a redirect but now shows "page deleted"
text. Most of the rest of the top 100 results are also utter garbage. In contrast, every one of Google's top 20 for this search
is an excellent result -- on topic and relevant, including two poker pages from Yahoo's own domain. (MSN manages 7 good results
and 13 poor ones, but none as awful any of the Yahoo ones.)
June 25, 2007
I don't know if this is particularly interesting to note or not, but since the start of the 2007 World Series of Poker,
Hitwise shows basically no ranking changes in terms of visit traffic for the online cardrooms. Like with the poker information
sites, no doubt most are getting more visits and more unique visitors, but (according to Hitwise anyway) no cardroom appears
to be getting a significantly greater boost from the WSOP than any other. In other words, UltimateBet.com hasn't gotten a
big spike from Phil Hellmuth winning his eleventh WSOP title, and PokerStars.com hasn't gotten a spike from signing Daniel
Negreanu as a "Team" member -- which isn't surprising since for two weeks Fullcontactpoker.com had no functioning
URL to the "welcomefcp" page meant to welcome Fullcontactpoker.com players to PokerStars. The URL listed goes to a
404/page-not-found error. Now there is at least a PokerStars banner on some of the pages. Another cardroom bizarrely asleep at the switch.
June 23, 2007
I've come back from being out of town, but the Google one word [poker] search continues to be out to lunch. Besides some of
the weird, extremely trivial domains showing up, now it seems internal pages on good or great quality sites are sometimes
outranking the index page for those domains. For a generic search like [poker] that should almost never be the case.
June 19, 2007
I'll be out of town for a couple days, which means I won't have to kill any more electrons typing about what the heck Google
is thinking with their Universal Search. The one word search terms are a mess, and for what? So the #4 result for a [poker]
search today can be a two day old news story titled "Poker Brad returns in Emerald Handicap". Poker Brad is a horse...
the story is from before a race that was run now two days ago... the race was not particularly important. At the same time the
World Series of Poker is underway and numerous stories from there would be more relevant to 99.9% of the people searching
for [poker] than a pre-race story about a horse that happens to have the word as its first name.
On the other hand, with three lame about.com subdomains in the top thirty for a [poker] search, a news story about a poker
Zippo lighter would fit right in with the craziness.
June 17, 2007
The bizarre one word searches on Google are not confined to "poker". A "gambling" search also shows Wikipedia at #1 and the
useless answers.com duplicate at #2. "Craps" also has answers.com and about.com in the top 10. The phenomenon is also
apparently boosting howstuffworks.com pages, but those are of much higher quality than the about.com pages, and as unique
content put them light years ahead of answers.com. To emphasize the point again, multiple word searches seem quite good.
June 14, 2007
I feel like I'm getting whiplash from watching the wildly fluctuating results for a one word "poker" search. Today the quality of
that search hit yet another low point.
Result #7 is the very weak Poker.about.com result. As mentioned below, prior to this weirdness regarding one word searches,
Poker.about.com had never been in the top 100 before. Sadly, #8 is even worse -- Answers.com/topic/poker. The content of
Answers.com is primarily a copy of the Wikipedia (already ranked at #2). The Wikipedia is a pitiful #2 result, but listing a
copy of that article at #8, ahead of high quality, authoritative domains is incompetent. The other content on the
Answers.com page besides that taken from the Wikipedia is also just copied from another source. Answers.com should rank for
no search of any kind. It's a duplicate. But that aside, ranking such a trivial domain above authority sites is
mind-boggling.
But that is just the start... cafepress.com at #12, Casinogambling.about.com at #16 (as if ranking the low value
Poker.about.com in the top ten is not bad enough), the PR2 (with all of 39 links according to Yahoo!)
featherweight Bonpoker.com at #20, and to top it off at #25 Answers.com/topic/fireplace-poker. Bleech.
Google, whatever you are trying to do with these one word searches, you are seriously sucking right now.
And then that said, the multiple word poker searches tend to be quite good (aside from all the inappropriate 950 penalties
of course). As Matt Cutts wrote, making a search engine these days is not easy. But a two-toed sloth with a tin can and a
piece of string could come up with better results than the current one-word poker results.
June 13, 2007
While it is only a traffic thing and doesn't reflect as much on search changes, the effects of the beginning of the World
Series of Poker show in last weeks Hitwise traffic rankings. As noted on the Top 25 poker information sites page, Hitwise
tracks raw number of visits to a site. Unlike Compete.com and Quantcast.com, which track unique visitors, an unique individual
who visits a site 100 times in a month will be counted 100 times, whereas Compete and Quantcast will count that person just once.
Anyway, Hitwise shows significant traffic spikes for both Worldseriesofpoker.com and Pokernews.com (the official live update
site of the Series)... with both up about 250% in comparison to other poker information sites. (All these sites presumably
are getting more traffic this month; but the official site and Poker News are benefiting more than the rest.) Another
interesting note is Taopoker.blogspot.com, the poker blog of tireless poker writer Paul McGuire, shows a major jump, from
not registering enough traffic to be tracked three weeks ago, to #71 two weeks ago (the first partial week of the WSOP) to #31
last week. This despite Pauly not being able to do chip updates on his blog (he's working for Poker News though).
Pokerwire.com is the only other site to show significant Series-related movement (from the mid-40s to #20).
Daniel Negreanu of Fullcontactpoker.com signed a deal with PokerStars.com where he will disband his cardroom and join their Team
of players. I'll add Fullcontactpoker.com onto the next version of the Top 25 lists when it shows non-cardroom traffic figures.
June 11, 2007
The effects of Google's new Universal Search seem to be getting sillier all the time. Besides the ranking of mediocre
quality sites for the one word "poker" search, and besides those results shifting strangely every day, the weirdness
includes the near constant ranking of the same news story in the #4 slot for a poker search. An Associated Press story about
former FBI agent Joe Navarro and his reading of poker tells has been featured for a few days, but with different
publications being listed as reporting the story. It's bad enough that a fairly trivial story clutters up the top 10, but to
recycle the same story day after day is just inept.
June 7, 2007
Compete.com came out with its newest rankings, updated to May 2007. Not too much movement among the top 25 sites, other than
Pokersourceonline.com dropping quite a bit, to a level half of its April 2006 to April 2007 average. It drops down to the
bottom of the Compete.com top 25, to a level similar to its Quantcast.com numbers, but none of the other sites below the top
25 overtakes it. Sites like Pokerjunkie.com, Tightpoker.com and others show a significant drop from April to May.
Pokersavvy.com is one top 26-50 site that shows an upward spike, but still well below the level of Pokersourceonline.com.
June 6, 2007
Yahoo did a significant update several hours ago, leading to
results like this. Describing this as
pathetic would be generous. Some of the results are not bad at all -- generally these are results that spammers have not targeted
with Google groups or spaces.msn.com accounts.
June 3, 2007
The Google results for a poker search continue to bounce around like a drunk on speed. Poker.net makes it to #1 for a day,
poker.about.com continues its ludicrous rise in the results with it at #8 as I type this, ESPN at #2. Multiple word searches
continue to not be effected much, but considering poker is the #1 search term that there is, the results for that one word
search are oddball at best.
New Quantcast traffic data was released today. There was some jiggling around among the top 25 poker information sites, but
nothing too wild. I won't be updating the top 25 every month if only because Quantcast numbers come out on the 3rd while
Compete.com updates in the middle if the month. I'll probably do updates quarterly, and note any new sites or major changes
in this journal space. Also June and July have the oddest traffic spikes for poker sites, as the World Series of Poker is
currently underway. Some sites, most obviously Worldseriesofpoker.com have strong traffic spikes during this time that isn't
really illustrative of the domain's overall popularity.
May 31, 2007
The bizarre Google results for a one word poker search disappeared late today, with some of the oddball sites dropping dozens
of spots to more plausible rankings. For example, poker.about.com is currently showing at #49 instead of #10.
May 29, 2007
The results for a one word poker search continue to move around dramatically... Poker.net strangely at #2, with Poker.com moving
down to #8 (while getting a second result at #20, despite almost never having a second result in the top 100 before). Trivial results
in the second ten include poker.about.com, cafepress.com, and pokersbest.net.
Over memorial day weekend somebody got drunk down at the Googleplex and a lot of misapplied 950 penalties seem to have been put
back into effect. It would seem likely that the oddball results being served up and a reintroduction of a lot of 950 penalties
would point to yet another data screwup. However, since major changes seem to be happening daily, perhaps Google will eventually
ease back into the improving mode it had gotten into earlier this month. However, if the past is any indication, more likely their
accomplishments have been swallowed up yet again by bad data and bad choices. We'll have to wait and see.
May 25, 2007
The Google phenomenon mentioned the past two days about a one word poker search alters itself today. Full Tilt Poker
returns to #1 (from #14), and Poker.net drops from #4 to #20. At the same time, different trivial sites bubble up where
they don't belong: the spammy Techmetrix.com and zero content Playcasinoguide.com both in the top 25 for example.
May 24, 2007
Yahoo announced a major update on their search blog. Normally it takes a day or two for Yahoo results to settle down, but
at this point it seems they have improved a bit, but still find themselves stuck with the worst of the three search engines.
Here is a search for poker games.
It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde... #9 is Dmoz, then #10 is pukey spaces.msn.com result. #11 is the Wikipedia, then a
pukey redirect followed by a deleted spamblog post. #14 is the Yahoo Directory, then a removed forum post followed by a
groups-beta.google.com spam group. Dmoz, Wikipedia and Yahoo directory... and five 100% useless results. The first
three may not be great results, but they are perfectly reasonable. The spam though is as bad as it gets. (Seven of the
first eight results are reasonable.)
Yahoo would improve greatly if they simply did not rank anything from spaces.msn.com and groups-beta.google.com.
The May 23rd post below seems to have overstated the widespread nature of Google's update yesterday, but the change regarding
a one word poker search is even more pronounced today. While most results did not change enormously (though there have been
changes across the board), one word searches seem to have been effected a lot outside the poker niche, so it seems what what
I mentioned yesterday is part of a larger phenomenon, possibly due from the ramifications of "universal search"
mentioned in the post of May 18th.
Anyway, the oddity I mentioned yesterday seems to have been addressed today,
Poker.com shoots up to #1, putting
it ahead of Poker.net (and everything else). Clearly this update greatly values keyword exact match in domain name... and
given that Poker.com is on the market right now, no doubt makes it look like a better buy today than it did yesterday.
May 23, 2007
Google has done one of its largest updates in quite a long time today, or at least there has been a very major shift in
the English languages results for a
poker search. Poker.net inexplicably
vaults up to #3. It has never ranked that high. While exact match in domain name is always a possible explanation, that still
wouldn't explain why Poker.com is behind it at #4. No matter what, Poker.com has more algo oomph behind it than Poker.net.
Additionally Full Tilt Poker drops
from #1 to #14 (I guess spamming Poker Affiliate World is harmful to your health, see May 21st post). Then comes the
rather week Pokerjunkie.com result, followed by a godawful #16 ranking for poker.about.com. Yikes. But that isn't the tip of
the "trivial sites appear from nowhere" iceberg. #20 shows a banner farm domain called Pokersbest.net, #23 is the
Answers.com copy of the Wikipedia page, #25 is Cardwolves.com, #26 is Keepyourface.com... and so on. There certainly are
domains that deserve higher rankings for the one word term than these.
On the other hand, overall this looks to be a good update, little hacker spam, for instance. Maybe it'll shake up in the
next day, but we have an interesting snapshot showing right now.
May 21, 2007
The perils of outsourcing SEO... A couple days ago
this bizarre post appeared on Poker Affiliate World. Of all the dumb things a person can do in the world, spamming
an affiliate forum is right near the top, especially in such a cloddish way. Apparently FullTilt Poker has a
hire-the-clueless project. The funniest part of making such a stupid but high profile act like this is how completely
unhelpful it. The SEO benefit of a single link from a minor thread on a forum is like putting a feather on a tank.
There is no benefit, but the blatant spam highlights the rest of the actions of the company.
For example, this thread highlights the spammy nature of Full Tilt Poker's front page: multiple H1 tags, below the fold
text that appears to have zero user-friendliness, plus their extremely aggressive link buying (often on sites like
Topix.net and Sfgate.com that blatantly violate the Google Adsense rules -- by running Adsense while also linking to
online gambling sites). Of course, posting
nonsense threads on forums is blatant spam, but in this case that minor spam itself is not as dangerous as the red flag
it raises, since it encourages an exploration of the companies other practices.
An online poker cardroom like Full Tilt is worth nine or ten figures, and earns tens of millions of dollars directly
from search engines. Amateurishly putting that all at risk just to put a feather on a tank is stupid in the extreme.
It's been awhile since Party Poker's actions got them a Google death sentence that cost them over $100,000,000 in lost
revenue, but forgetting that history could condemn others to re-live it.
May 18, 2007
This week Google started displaying only nine algorithmic results on its first page of results for many major searches, like
"poker". Instead of a tenth result they currently are inserting a Google news result at #4... for a golf tournament.
Poker.com (and everything else) gets pushed down, and PacificPoker.com gets pushed off the first page, just to show a mostly
irrelevant link that can be accessed by anyone looking for news via the "News" linked at the top of the page.
From its inception, Google made a big deal, and got a lot of credit for, not polluting its algorithmic results with
paid or sponsored listings. They now have backtracked on that, even if Google News is its own site. Additionally this
trivial golf result has been there for more than 24 hours. Has there been no poker news for 24 hours? Has there been no
more relevant poker news in the past three days? What this bizarre choice does, besides make the results weaker and
more open to scorn, is make Google News listings more important, which is a bad thing in itself since the "news"
in Google News (for poker anyway) is primarily ranting blogs, press releases and articles that happen to use poker
(poker-faced, fireplace poker...) in the text of an article.
Bad move Google. Try and channel back to the day when you were a user-friendly search engine. You can do it.
May 16, 2007
Quantcast.com has all kinds of secondary
data available, like demographics of sites and similar sites. They are upfront about estimating on lower traffic sites,
but still there is some good data to be found about various sites. The Quantcast traffic methodology seems to have some
superior value over others in that they don't "double count" by merely adding subdomain traffic on top of traffic
to a main domain. For example, they show 100% of the unique visitors who go to subdomains of Cardplayer.com also going to
Cardplayer.com itself, where they get counted. Obviously it would be silly to count a hit on a graphic hosted on a
subdomain as an entirely different person.
May 13, 2007
MSN continues to be a real puzzler. The results have taken a very dramatic turn for the better, most of the time, but
when a problem shows itself, it tends to be just so bizarre it is hard to know what to think. For example a current
poker search. First two results are
from the Wikipedia, not great but reasonable. Then Interpoker, Poker News, William Hill and Pacific Poker. Okay, cardrooms
plus a top information portal. Then comes a page from Play Winning Poker, but not the index page (which seems to not rank
for much of anything because MSN has screwed up how it interprets its 301). But even discounting not ranking the far
more powerful index page of the site, MSN doesn't even choose to rank one of the half dozen or so pages that should be
far stronger than this /online/ one for a one word "poker" search.
Next comes 888.com, which would be fine except Pacific Poker is basically the same site, so ranking them both in the
top 10 is not very perceptive. Still, as mistakes go, not bad. Then comes Wingows.com. Huh? No Pokerstars, no Party
Poker, but Wingows? Um, no. Still, Wingows is a legitimate site, so as mistakes go it is only mildly bad. But then we
come to the tenth result -- an utterly useless, no content piece of subdomain nothing meant to simply attract whatever
traffic it can get to the Google Adsense links at the top of the page. Bleech. While this is a lousy result, even more
puzzling is how it ranks at all. It only has 600 links aiming at it; the domain is not a respected topical one; the
text isn't notable. How on earth is this ranking in the top 10 for the most popular search term in the world?
MSN is far better than at the beginning of the year, but it still needs to iron out issues like ranking the wrong page
from a strong domain, ranking mediocre entities like Wingows over far more deserving, similar sites, and then most
importantly, not ranking at all complete trash like the tenth result.
May 11, 2007
Virgin post for the site... The amount of mistakes Google is making when it is applying its 950 penalty seem to be
shrinking, that is, the amount of pages that obviously don't deserve to be penalized seems to be getting less. The 950
penalty has been with us since at least September 2005, so significant improvement is both due and very welcome -- if
it manages to stick, and continues to improve since there are still a lot of errors. Only time will tell. |
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