Google Penalities Expiring
I blogged about this awhile back (Weird Things Going on at Google - July 3rd, 2008) about problems with poker affiliate sites in Google. It appears that everything has returned to normal for the most part.
CardsChat, Launch Poker, Poker Source and a number of others are all showing up where they used to in the search engine results. However, a number of the blogs, such as Bill Rini, have not yet returned to normal. I’m not sure if those blogs are going to return soon or not.
In addition to ranking for their names again, the site are also ranking for their “typical” keywords. For instance, Compatible Poker is once again ranking highly for mac poker.
It’s good to see the Google craziness come to an end (for now). Now all those affiliates can get back to business.
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Comments
Looks like the link buyers got a 3 month penalty and the link sellers got a bigger penalty. This is most likely because you can be almost certain who is selling links but not who is buying. Link buyers could be the website linked to or a competitor trying to sabotage another site.
If Google was serious about link buying a certain company *cough* http://www.webguidepartner.com *cough* wouldn’t have 5 out of 10 Google first page positions for some very competitive poker terms.
I’ve talked to some people at 
(censored) and this is sounding more and more like a problem that occurred on their end (google’s). The engineers had to fix it! We just got thrown in as sellers somehow by the algo is what I’ve come to conclude.
That’s interesting Roger, but I wonder why the big poker sites got their penalty removed after 90 days and not all the other sites and blogs who got penalized on July 2nd. I think Bill Rini’s blog lost its penalty a few days after the others. Maybe the penalty that expired after 90 days was for link buying, and the other sites got a more serious penalty for link selling. Does anybody know if reconsideration requests have any effect on the penalties, and how long it may take for the other sites who were hit.
I noticed that also, I guess they have changed something recently.