CardsChat.com

CardsChat

Last Update: August 11th, 2008

Run by a young British guy named Nick, CardsChat has historically been the best SEOed online poker forum. Running on a highly customized vBulletin install, Nick has carefully crafted all forms of SEO on CardsChat. Over the last few years, the site has grown into a rankings monster for all kinds of terms from the huge keywords to the long-tail forum post types of keywords. While CardsChat never really dominated any of the huge terms, the site consistently ranked top 10 for tons and tons of great keywords. Until the summer of 2008…

CardsChat is currently (as of late July 2008) suffering a Google penalty that was imposed relatively recently. CardsChat cannot be found in a top 10 result for any competitive keyword. In addition, “cards chat”, “cardschat” and other similar terms ALSO do not return a cardschat.com URL in the top 10. Basically, only “cardschat.com” and a few terms with the URL in them will return CardsChat domains high in the SERPs. There’s no doubt that this has devastated CardsChat’s traffic and, more importantly, all new/targeted Google traffic. While I’m sure the site still receives quite a few clicks per day from its loyal forum users (the user base is 50,000+, although I suspect only a small % actually read and post on CardsChat as that is typical for most forums), the drop-off in key new users being brought in from the search engines has probably hurt the site’s overall traffic a fair amount.

Technical analysis and constructive criticism

It’s hard to find things wrong on a technical level with CardsChat from an on-page point of view.  Therefore, I’ll focus on some of CardsChat’s on-page strong points.

  1. Highly detailed usage of robots.txt.  See http://www.cardschat.com/robots.txt.  Nick does a great job of keeping the extraneous crap out of Google.  In addition, the nofollow’ed internal links are very well done.
  2. Good internal linking.  CardsChat takes care to link wherever is appropriate, but not excessively.  This incessant driving of internal link juice to the money pages has historically led to great rankings for many of CardsChat’s pages.  For example, look at the bottom of a page like this: http://www.cardschat.com/poker-site-reviews.php.
  3. Great “classic” structuring.  All pages have good header tags, good usage of bolding, solid keyword density, enough text but not too much text, lightweight pages, etc.  Almost all of the basics have been tended to perfectly.  See pages like this for an example: http://www.cardschat.com/poker-bonuses.php.  In addition, vbSEO is used very well on the site.

So what’s wrong with CardsChat?  I guess the main thing is that the non-user generated content (UGC) is pretty stale.  It doesn’t get updated too often, there isn’t a news section, etc.  I would generally say that it doesn’t matter because there are constantly new posts being added and I’m sure the Googlebot has a very high crawl rate on the site, but I think CardsChat would benefit from some link-bait sort of content.  I don’t see much of that on there…