Nat Arem's Blog

There’s no over-arching theme to this blog post, so I’ll just do it list-style…

1. I watched some of this program called “Lost Land of the Jaguar” — it’s a three-part (I think) series done by the BBC about rainforests and stuff in Guyana/Venezuela.  Most of the program was the typical stuff where some naturalists go bananas over a certain type of rare insect while the audience yawns, but there was some incredible footage of one of the hosts doing a multi-day climb up an enormous cliff face.  I know that I’ve seen Port-a-Ledges before, but for some reason it really hit me this time.  These guys were sleeping hundreds or thousands of feet above absolutely nothing while being held up by a bunch of pins hammered into an unstable rock face.  I mean, seriously, wtf.  I am not really afraid of heights.  I love going on rollercoasters, going rapelling doesn’t make me nervous at all, I’ve gone on ziplines hundreds of feet above the ground below, etc.  But I would be absolutely shitting myself if I had to do what those guys did in that TV show.  Incredibly scary and difficult.
2. Why are people, in general, so goddamn annoying about what other people are drinking?  It seems like, across all cultures, people think that drinking is the greatest thing known to man and that everyone should be drinking on a near-constant basis.  I guess I should let it be known that I am not really a huge fan of drinking because I don’t think alcohol tastes good, but I do drink sometimes and I get drunk on occasion.  Maybe like 10 times a year, max.  I can appreciate the fun involved in getting drunk and acting like an idiot, but I can’t stand when other people insist that someone else be drinking.  People here in Costa Rica are actually way less worse about it than people back in the States, but it seems like everyone always has to be asking what other people are drinking and it’s like a constant focus to shovel as much alcohol into oneself at all times.  Why don’t people ask other people what they’re eating?  Or what they’re wearing?  Or what they’re driving?  Or what they’ve been watching on TV?  Or how they’ve been doing in their fantasy league?  I mean, sure, people do ask those questions — but rarely.  I guess only girls ask about what people are wearing and only poker players ask about what people are driving, but you get the idea.  On the other hand, it seems routine for people who I barely know to walk up to me at a bar, ask me what I’m drinking, have me respond and then they lift their glass and walk away.  Or give a horrified look if I’m drinking water or soda.  Whatever, I just don’t get it.
3. I’m going to UFC 88 this coming weekend.  I’m pretty goddamn pumped up, even though there isn’t a title fight.  I’ll be taking pictures/videos and whatnot to be posted on my blog.

I am sorry to my normal blog readers, I’m trying to keep the SEO stuff to a minimum.  Maybe I should just start a separate SEO blog.  But, this is pretty big what I’m seeing here…

It appears that PokerStars.com AND PokerStars.net have been heavily penalized in Google.

For me, they’re gone from a search for poker, online poker and a few other major keywords.  They used to be top 10 for all of them and top 5 for many of them.  In addition, while they are still number 1 for “pokerstars”, the homepage is gone from Google:

You can confirm that the page is pretty much gone by searching for the cache page (no results):

So they’re actually arguably ranking for a better page (the client download page), but they’ve lost their sitelinks, which used to have them at #1 with 8 indented links, plus another link down below.  In this setup, they’re much more likely to lose spillover clicks to people like Internet-Poker.co.uk and EveryPoker.com because people will spot the bonus text and they’ll be tempted to click on the lower options. Of course, then PokerStars has to pay out a CPA to those guys and it will end up costing them many thousands of dollars because there are SO many players that are Googling PokerStars looking to sign up. Maybe more money depending on how long this lasts.

It’s pretty shocking for me to see this happen. PokerStars actually seems ways less spammy in their SEO tactics than many other big poker sites. I wonder what else is on the way…

As you may have noticed, Google now includes offerings from Google Suggest on the homepage of google.com.  Google has had Suggest around for years so you may have used it before, but now it’s live for the masses and, for a lot of people, this will be the first time they’ve been exposed to the technology.  Being in the poker world, I am, of course, interested in how this will impact the poker SEO world.

For your viewing pleasure, I took a number of screenshots.

First, a few big keywords:

First, the biggie… “poker”. This is one of the most searched terms on the internet, so it’s very significant that PokerStars is actually appearing twice in the top 4 suggestions. It’s a little odd to see PokerRoom and PokerTracker sneaking in, but they should see nice traffic boosts also. The fallout from a huge term like poker could be a TON of visits every day. I expect Full Tilt, Party and others will do whatever they can to get into the suggest box for poker.

Online poker is a little different. No real rooms in the list, just a good list of mid-level keywords that could be a good idea to target from this point forward. While I’m sure “online poker tips” was an okay keyword before, it wasn’t anything really special… that could change if it keeps its spot here in Google Suggest.

Free poker is a huge term, although a relatively low-value per click term. People looking to play for free just aren’t that valuable to poker rooms, although one reason for having the .net free rooms is to eventually convert the free money players over to real money. For that reason, rooms would much rather have the free player traffic than not have it.

One significant thing I notice here is that “online poker 66″ is showing up in both online poker and free poker. I just don’t get it. For a long-time, PokerStars.Net had a stranglehold on the “free poker” term. OnlinePoker66 was hanging around, but never #1. Somewhat recently, PokerStars.Net disappeared from Google (a similar penalty to the one that PSO, CardsChat, Launch Poker, etc are under – see Weird Things Going on at Google). So in the wake of the PokerStars.Net Google problems, OnlinePoker66 has been promoted to the #1 ranking for “free poker”. And now they get two suggest spots in some huge poker keywords. So what’s the problem? Well, take a look at their links, as reported by Google: OnlinePoker66 links in Google. Ummmm, okay. So they have very few links, a bunch of which are porn links and they rank that highly? Something isn’t right. I know that Google links are not an accurate list of links online, but there is still obviously something wrong here.

Moving on, here are a few rooms:

These don’t show that much that is interesting to me. It proves that Google sees people searching for bonuses (obviously), rakeback, cheating/rigging and a few other things. Nothing really ground-breaking, but it is interesting to note that “rakeback” variations appear higher for a room that allow it openly (ie, Cake) than a room that doesn’t allow it (ie, PokerStars). This indicates that Google is doing some sort of intelligent ordering of suggestions but that the criteria isn’t necessarily about number of results.

That theory is somewhat borne out by the Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker screenshots below:

The rooms are both being plagued in Suggest by “cheating” and “scandal” variations of their keyword. In addition, the scandal and cheating variations both appear very highly in the Suggest ordering despite not having as many results as some of the lower keywords.

Either way, it should be pretty interesting to see how everything plays out with Google Suggest being a google.com feature. It’s possible that Google will be shuffling the Suggest options and ordering so much that attempting to target suggestions will become basically pointless. Although, personally, I believe that we’ll see a relatively stable set of suggestions since Google has been testing this technology for so long and they probably have pretty sophisticated technology to help run it behind the scenes. Has anyone else noticed anything else they consider to be interesting?

The description from Yahoo! Sports:

Cuba’s Angel Valodia Matos, left, kicks match referee Sweden’s Chakir Chelbat in the face during a bronze medal match against Kazakhstan’s Arman Chilmanov in the men’s taekwondo +80 kilogram class at the Beijing 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Saturday, Aug. 23, 2008. Matos attacked the official, throwing punches and kicks, after being declared the loser in his bronze medal match.

I mean, I know it sets a bad precedent and it endangers refs, blah, blah, blah.  The mature thing for me to do is to actually think about the serious implications of stating that something like this is pretty hilarious and cool.  But… I don’t care.  On some level, I really love this picture.  The Cuban guy doesn’t even look angry.

Of course, I’m sure the guy is going to be banned for life from competition and he had to know that would be the result of kicking a ref in the head, so maybe this is the taekwondo version of the big speech in the office on the way out the door.

This is a pretty random post, but here goes…

Over the last few years, people spouting off about subjects they know nothing about has gradually tilted me more and more.  I’ve also come to realize that very few people know a lot about more than a few narrow subjects, yet many proclaim their “opinion” about so many different areas as if they’re an expert.  You might ask, what brought this post on?  Two main things: football season and the presidential race.

I am so incredibly sick of the sports fanatic culture I can’t even begin to describe it.  The reason is that, more than any area I can think of, the sports fan culture is filled with wannabe experts who, upon closer inspection, don’t know anything at all.  The odd part is that I used to be absolutely crazy about sports, although that phase ended about five years ago.  But even then, it used to bother me whenever I’d end up talking about sports with “typical” Philadelphia sports fans.  And if you’re from Philadelphia, I’m sure you know the type.  They listen to 610 WIP (the sports talk radio station), they love reading editorial pieces in the Inquirer and Daily News, they don’t miss a single Comcast SportsNet SportsNite (the local version of SportsCenter) broadcast ever, they wear an Eagles jersey every game Sunday, etc.  I’m sure every city has them, although I have to believe that these Philadelphians are particularly annoying.  I don’t mind their fanaticism.  What bothers me a lot is when they spout off about their supposedly incredible knowledge of NFL defensive schemes, offensive lineman (seriously, does anyone really know anything about offensive lineman that they deduced on their own without any help from Chris Mortensen or John Clayton?), draft picks or whatever else they feel the need to constantly talk about.  They don’t have the slightest bit of what I would call “genuine knowledge” on any of those subjects.  Yet they repeat exactly what they heard on Comcast SportsNet a few days before as if it’s gospel… “oh yea, such and such new defensive package is going to give Eli Manning fits, you can bet the house on that one!”.  Honestly, I go on lifetilt when I hear those types of conversations among people who really think they know what they’re talking about.  It makes me feel like I’m listening to a couple brainwashed children repeat the talking points they’ve received in their latest session… it’s just pathetic.

Moving on, it’s the same thing with the presidential election.  People hear something on CNN or Fox News and they then repeat it like it’s definitely true.  I hear and read stuff like “oh yea, McCain knows way more about foreign policy than Obama so he has to be the better candidate for dealing with Iraq.”  When I hear that I want to stab my eyes out.  Seriously — how dumb are people?  If poker has taught me anything, it’s that for every extremely smart individual, there are at least ten complete buffoons.  People come up with retarded conclusions/rationalizations (I’ve hit three club flushes in a row, they’re lucky for me!) on a constant basis.  They hear some guy on Fox spout off about McCain’s experience versus Obama’s experience and they take it as fact!  These people seemingly have no idea that everyone has agendas, especially in politics.  That guy talking about McCain and Obama probably has a strong viewpoint (pro-McCain if he’s on Fox) and he’s going to do whatever it takes to back that viewpoint up.  But the average person is too dumb to filter through the crap they’re being fed, so they just repeat it like gospel.  No genuine knowledge.  No first-hand research.  These people couldn’t tell you the first thing about McCain or Obama’s foreign policy work except that “McCain has been involved in it for longer than Obama.”  Shouldn’t that be like the 170th most important factor in someone’s decision-making process when they’re voting on an issue?  Of course McCain has been involved in things for longer, the guy is 25 years older than Obama.

I’m getting off-topic though.  My point is that I really appreciate talking to people with genuine knowledge of a subject.  For instance, getting back to the sports thing, if someone says “Such and such is a great guard because he’s only given up two sacks per year over the last three years and he also run blocks well, as evidenced by [some running back's] 1400 yards per year.”  That doesn’t bother me one bit.  Or if someone said “I think McCain has a better understanding of [some subject] because his voting record over the last five years, in retrospect, has turned out to be far more correct than Obama.”  Despite the fact that the sports guy might not know if the RB’s performance had to do with the OL and that the politics example is pretty results-oriented, I can respect people’s opinions when they bring ACTUAL knowledge to the table.  They don’t spout off simplistic lines about NFL defensive packages.  Now, if the same person could explain WHY that defensive package was going to stop Eli Manning, I might respect their opinion.  But simply repeating what they heard on TV?  I don’t think so.  There’s no genuine knowledge there.  Or, as the Gertrude Stein saying goes, there’s no there there.

To wrap this up, I don’t know why I posted this.  I guess it’s just a tilt, which I need to do every once in awhile on here.  Next time you hear someone spewing bullshit about sports or politics or about something they obviously heard on TV or read on the internet the night before, please call them out on it.  You’re doing the world a huge service by calling out the morons.

I recently decided to downgrade my Windows laptop from Vista to XP.  I was just tired of dumb Vista and its various amounts of retardation/slowness.  So anyway, I have an old XP Pro license sitting around that was unused.  The problem was that the disk that it came with was actual Windows XP Pro … no SP1, SP2, updates, etc.  I would rather avoid updating the machine for two days, so I used another disc that was an XP Pro SP2 install disc.

Obviously, the XP Pro key doesn’t work with the XP Pro SP2 install, so I had to use another key just to get through the install phase, after which I planned on calling Microsoft Product Activation to explain my predicament and get my version of Windows activated.  So I call M$ a few minutes ago and I get someone who is, obviously, Indian.  Nothing against Indians, but the call centers over there are typically horrid and this one didn’t disappoint.  These support people are scripted robots, not humans.  Our conversation went something like this:

Me: “Hi I need to activate my license of Windows XP.  I have an unused XP Pro license, but it didn’t work with the SP2 install disc, so I had to use another key.  I’m hoping to be able to switch it now so my correct key is on record.”

Her: “How many times have you installed your copy of Windows?”

Me: “I am not sure — the key that I used to install Windows isn’t actually mine.  I just did it so I could get through the install and call you guys with my unused XP Pro key.”

Her: “Sir, how many times have you installed this copy of Windows?”

Me: “I have no idea, but I haven’t ever used this XP Pro key that I have sitting in front of me.”

Her: “How many times has this copy of Windows been installed?”

Me: (started to get tilted) “Don’t you understand?  I have no idea how many times it has been installed.  I have a valid key though.”

Her: “In that case we cannot activate your license of Windows XP as it is against the terms of Microsoft’s license agreement.  Goodbye.”

Me: “Wait!  That isn’t okay.  I have a valid Windows license sitting in front of me.”

Her: “Sir, you must tell me how many times this copy of Windows has been installed.”

Me: “Okay, it has been installed zero times.”

Her: “Thank you sir.  Please type in this number.” (she then proceeds to give me the information that I need)

I was dumbfounded after I got off the phone.  I mean, is it really that simple?  Microsoft is utterly retarded.  There I was trying to be honest and it nearly got me kicked off the line.  Then I simply lie and they let me right through.  What a retarded system.  It makes me wonder why I even bother jumping through their hoops?  It makes me want to become a full-time Ubuntu user — which, by the way, I’ve been playing around with lately and I really like.  The main thing holding me back from Ubuntu is the lack of (simple) RoboForm functionality in Firefox.  I’m sure there’s some complicated way for me to do it with Wine or whatever, but it’s too goddamn complicated to bother with.

Also, for those if you wondering why I don’t use a Corporate or cracked version of Windows, it’s because a) I have a valid license already that has never been used and b) I don’t like to worry about running a pirated copy of Windows because of Windows Update problems down the line.  I’d like to put SP3 on the computer along with any other updates, so running a valid copy makes for less headaches down the road.