PocketFives.com
Last Update: August 11th, 2008
In April 2008, PocketFives underwent a major makeover. The site’s look changed a bit and the SEO changed a lot. Not necessarily too much for the better though. The site’s page theming is still very poor, the forum URLs are a mess due to the rewrite engine being used and things like XML sitemaps are not being used effectively. Not to mention occasional performance issues popping back up. That isn’t to say that PocketFives is unaware of these issues — as an admin on the site, I’ve informed the “decision-makers” of the problems many times and everyone agrees that the site needs fixing. When it actually gets done, that’s another issue altogether.
On the good side, PocketFives has a ton of natural links. Way more than competing poker forum sites like CardsChat. Lots of people willingly post links to P5s profiles, P5s news stories, P5s threads multiple times per week. The links keep coming and, in theory, rankings are on the way. However, due to a lot of off-page optimization problems lingering from the pre-April 2008 site (ie, hex codes for URLs), Google is still plenty confused about which pages to rank on P5s for which terms. This is, of course, in addition to the on-page problems mentioned above.
Regardless of the aforementioned factors, P5s remains a rankings beast in the important username long-tail. For almost anyone with an active P5s account, their P5s profile is in the top 5 on Google. While the traffic is not targeted for conversion to anything specific and there are not any “huge” terms in the name market, there are literally thousands of terms that deliver name-oriented traffic to P5s on a daily basis. This sort of dominance cannot go unappreciated — P5s is the undisputed market leader here.
Technical analysis and constructive criticism
- Poor Forum URLs. As an example, I just looked at the forum and latest forum posting was on a thread with the URL “http://www.pocketfives.com/poker-forums/7/5600-HU-SNG_2C00_-DARIO-vs-Zugwat-3171190″. The title of the post itself is “5600 HU SNG, DARIO vs Zugwat”. So, mostly, that URL is okay. What’s the problem? Well, the goofy rewrite engine being used on PocketFives converts the comma into _2C00_. I’m *pretty* sure Google doesn’t know what to make of that sort of gibberish. That’s not to say that Google doesn’t know how to interpret characters. For instance, %20 is the encoded character for a space in the URL. So if a URL is www.example.com/example page.html, you’ll actually see www.example.com/example%20page.html when you try to go to the page. There’s nothing wrong with that, although the site would benefit from turning that URL into www.example.com/example-page.html. Either way, PocketFives is being hurt badly by the poor forum URLs.
- Relatively poor control over duplicate content. Pages can often be accessed at two URLs. For instance, as of August 11th, 2008, both http://www.pocketfives.com/poker-forums/poker-discussion.aspx and http://www.pocketfives.com/poker-forums/poker-discussion work to view the same page. Does that matter? Well, it isn’t a huge deal. Google is pretty smart at filtering out the secondary URL access point. It also probably wouldn’t matter much if both were regularly being crawled. However, SEO hard enough when the basics are all perfect — why make it harder on yourself by giving up little bits of optimization here and there. So while this is far from a horrible error, it is one that should be fixed.
- Bloated pages. In an online poker rankings search, PocketFives’ rankings page often shows up top 10. As of August 11th, 2008, that page is clocking in at 344k. That’s enormous. Pages should generally not exceed 100k of HTML (Google reports the HTML value, not the total value including images), although a little leeway is acceptable for content heavy pages. 344k, on the other hand, is never acceptable in my opinion. Not only does it make for a poor user experience, it also causes a number of issues with SEO.
- Good player-name link exposure. For all of the weak points on PocketFives, the player profile pages are relatively well-optimized. The URLs are near perfect, the titles are good, the on-page content is good (although, like almost all pages on the site, the HTML is bloated) and the pages tend to rank very well. But most importantly, the key players are given terrific link exposure. The “top 10″ rankings box that appears all over the site delivers important link juice to some of the highest profile online players. In addition, the rankings page (http://www.pocketfives.com/rankings) delivers guaranteed crawling and decent link juice to the top 100 ranked online tournament players in the world. That all contributes to great player name rankings — one that you’ve surely noticed when searching for online poker player names.
