Weird things going on at Google

I’m experiencing this as well. It’s as if nearly all traces of my blog (www.donkeysdraw.com) have been erased from Google.

Keep on driving traffic with all the jailbait stuff and you will be safe imo.

Awesome blog buddy.

– Sebastien

sounds like what happened to john chow from thetechzone - back in the day his blog offered backlinks to readers for reviews of his blog, etc.

then one day google just burried him in the SERPs. still had pagerank etc, and only recently his pagerank started growing again.

in a sense it makes sense not that i’m saying thats what happened for sites like cardschat but it does seem very simliar…

- Jon

This sounds like a classic case of websites being penalised for selling links (or buying links).

Buying and selling links without nofollow is against google’s T&C and they can and will penalise you for it. I haven’t checked all of them but certainly bill rini is selling links.

Drop me an email if you want to discuss in more depth - would love to talk about SEO and poker

A quick link check reveals the pokersourceonline are buying links - see the right hand bar here:

http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/

Nice post Nat. I think we are all baffled at what is going on in google.

Up For Poker has also been crushed by this. Are you suggesting that if we sell advertising, that that’s why we’re taking a hit?

I used to work at Google, and one of the areas I worked on was spamfighting. It certainly does sound like these sites have received some sort of penalty. The fact that you can still find the pages (e.g., by searching on the URL) is not inconsistent with that.

As far as what led to the penalty, it’s hard to know. It could be buying or selling of links. Or it could just be that the sites look spammy to the algorithms that try to automatically identify spam. In general, pure affiliate sites that don’t offer any other value to the visitor are considered spam. But of course this is tough to identify purely algorithmically so sometimes good sites get thrown out with the bad.

You can see some of Google’s guidelines here (you may already be familiar with them):

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

If you feel a site has been unfairly penalized, you can request reconsideration:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

I believe it’s several factors, but the big one would seem to be that several of the sites buying links have been reported for buying links and Google has flagged them and anyone that links to them Godfather style.

In addition, the loss of ‘big’ poker blogs (Oddjack and Charsquad) and the lack of activity have also led to an overall loss of PR in the poker niche.

In the end quality content like Bill Rini, Pauly and Wicked Chops will attract readers PR or no PR. In general I think it’s an overrated metric.

This seems pretty extreme and from what I’m reading it seems very, very focused on poker blogs. I’m contacting the 2 people I sold links to to attemtp to negotiate an early termination so I can plead to Google to reconsider.

I don’t think it is just confined to poker websites. I think it was just pokers ‘turn’ to get get done by Google and they chose the most popular time (WSOP) to do it for maximum publicity

The problem was caused by bloggers getting greedy. Even some of the most popular blogs are top heavy with these text links - it doesn’t take a genius to work out what was going on within ten seconds on some of these sites. Google appears to employ humans to check sites these days.

I don’t blame these bloggers though - someone emails them and say we will give you $x per month for simply putting a text link on your site. It was a no brainer in the short term…however no-one will touch them now for placing anymore adverts on their site and they will have to work twice as hard now to try and monetise their sites.

Not sure what Bill is complaining about though. His advert on his site says:

“Run of site text ad (every page): $1200 per month with a 3 month minimum buy.” So he clearly knew what he was doing or was badly advised.

Nice (no) work if you can get it.

No work? Can you honestly look at Bills site and say he put no work into it? Gosh. I don’t know him, don’t read his blog, don’t care, but .. no work? The essence of blogging goes against the nofollow tag. Wordpress was created with all sorts of effort so that any idiot can blog, without knowing a single line of code.

@Cathy

I’m not knocking Bill or any other blogger who wants to monetise their blog. I enjoy his blog and he seems a decent chap.

Google does not like paid text links and that is that. Why should websites like Poker Source Online, Internet Poker, Launch Poker and the rest rank highly in search engines, not based on content, but based on being able to afford buy links?

@Andy, I am a decent chap

I think the thing that is most frustrating is that this has been enforced so unequally. What about Stars and Tilt running blogger tournaments in exchange for cutting and pasting a link in a blog post?

The least they could have done is said “Hey, you know that no-link buying rule? Well, after several years of saying that we’ll penalize you for it and then letting people exploit link buying, we’re actually going to enforce it.”

This was definately not human manipulated. If this was something that was manually reviewed by a team of G spam busters a lot more sites would have gone down in the muck. It’s all algorithim and percentage based upon links etc. If you have five links going to one site, inside of a sidebar, it’s as plane as day it was paid for. Google knows this and finally penalized the bloggers and us who bought links. Full Tilt generally buys one, maybe two links per box so the algorithim may not pick up on such as being paid for as it looks natural for a blogger to put a single link to a site in their sidebar. There are other factors that came into play which Im not going to discuss.

Remove your paid links, bend over and get a spanking, and hope google doesn’t ground us for too long! It’ll be interesting to see when and if these sites come out, where they’ll be ranking. It is pretty funny how the “new” heavy link buyers didnt get penalized. Maybe I’ll just create a new site and link bomb spam the shit out of a 5 page bonus term…..Google doesnt seem to mind that. Its only the good sites they want to punish. :/

***There are other factors that came into play which Im not going to discuss.***

Can you at least let us know what genre these factors fall in? Just other elements of google algorithm, or something involving people outside of google?