PokerStars in trouble with Google?
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…
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Comments
http://www.natarem.com/2008/08/09/well-ive-got-a-new-look/
It’s the WP Premium theme, which is also linked in my footer.
Nat,
In your opinion, is this something that was done manually by Google (i.e. explicitly) or something that was caused by either a) a rule that the domain broke or b) a new rule that was added that the domain breaks?
It seems kinda crazy that Google would explicitly be targeting individual sites.
Nat -
Good post. Pokerstars is balling believe me…
They’re the number 1 suggestion for the search query “poker” (now that Suggest has been implemented in the search bar).
So they’re basically tapping into that massive traffic and sending players directly to their client download page.
They should be OK.
I’m not sure what google is up too though, it seems a lot of domain names have been de-indexed recently…
Maybe they need some phDs over there.
Cheers!
– Sebastien
ispiked,
I believe it’s manual, for a number of reasons. I can’t say the reasons though…
Sebastien,
I’m well aware of PokerStars being #1 in Google Suggest for “poker” … I actually blogged about it a few days ago. However, there’s ZERO chance PokerStars is doing this on purpose. In fact, I don’t think they have the ability to do something like this except via robots.txt — and there’s nothing in there to suggest anything remotely like what you’re saying (http://www.pokerstars.com/robots.txt).
I’m not sure what you mean by them both being “#1″, but, yes, PokerStars.com returned today. I made a post about it today.
Where did you get your blog layout from? I’d like to get one like it for my blog.