TwoPlusTwo.com
Last Update: August 11th, 2008
TwoPlusTwo has been SEO braindead for years. I’m not saying they were completely unaware of the benefits of optimizing their forum, but they certainly haven’t acted on those thoughts if they were having them. Their inaction could also have been the product of their old UBB.threads forum software — it is inferior to their current solution (vBulletin) in many ways, one of which is SEO. vBulletin’s out of the box SEO is pretty blah, but there’s a plugin called vbSEO which rewrites URLs, among many other things, automatically. TwoPlusTwo is actually in the process of attempting to install vbSEO, which I suspect will drastically increase their search presence. Of course, TwoPlusTwo is still missing many of the ingredients of a money-making poker website and I’m a little skeptical whether they will ever really get it together. I know that twoplustwo probably prides itself on making what seems like a lot of money (and it certainly is), but a reorganization and refocusing of the site could lead to profits easily in the seven figures per month — or maybe even eight figures.
TwoPlusTwo has missed a number of boats due to an unwillingness to enter the affiliate market and some pretty extreme legal caution. Mason & Co believe heavily in their lawyer and I don’t fault them for doing so, but there’s no doubt it has cost them an enormous amount of money in the short term. I would estimate at least $50 million has been “sacrificed” by TwoPlusTwo’s cautionary stance, maybe significantly more. Of course, Mason has plenty of money from his book business and he might have decided that it wasn’t worth the legal risk to end up in court facing the DOJ (an unlikely but still scary scenario) — I’m certainly not complaining, it left a lot of room for the rest of us.
Technical analysis and constructive criticism
- HORRIBLE URL management. Okay, first, for technical reasons, Two Plus Two moves everything around to archive servers and so on. I don’t know if they’re still doing that with vBulletin, but they basically cause major confusion and crawling problems for Google when they’re moving posts around. Not only that, they don’t redirect any posts properly so all of the old links go to nowhere. If you search for “showflat” or “showthreaded” in conjunction with some Two Plus Two keywords, you’ll see some old threads. That’s because the old software (UBB.threads) had php scripts with those words in them, so you can be sure you’re looking at an old link. Does Two Plus Two properly redirect any of those URLs? Answer: nope. Not only that, they’ve moved around subdomains before and they’ve made a number of other errors with their URLs/pages that I won’t bother to list off here. Put it this way… they are not doing a good job in this department.
- Lack of robots.txt usage, along with proper nofollow’ing. The Two Plus Two registration page currently has a PageRank of 3. Why would they be passing ANY link juice to that page? They should be using robots.txt to block crawling of that page, along with implementation of nofollow’ed links everywhere on the site to pages like that. Not to mention that the privacy policy is clocking in at a PageRank of 4. While I don’t put much credence in toolbar page rank values, these numbers do show me that Two Plus Two is passing fair amounts of links into these pages for no purpose whatsoever.
- Lack of keywords in URLs. This is different than #1 because this is just a one-time change. They’d do much better if they had keywords in their profile pages and forum pages. They know about this and they’ve been trying to fix it. For a short while, they had vbSEO installed on their site, but they took it down because of performance reasons. This fix is pretty obvious.
- Not maximizing content. Two Plus Two actually has terrific non-UG content. But they basically hide it. The Two Plus Two Internet Magazine is located at: http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/current/. What’s the “current” there for? It’s probably just what the people publishing the magazine are used to… it shouldn’t be there, but it’s okay, that isn’t the worst thing they’ve done here. Quick check for URL canonicalization? Fail. http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/current/index.html works fine. That’s strike one. What’s the title of the page? “Two Plus Two Magazine”. I suppose that’s fine, although they’d do better with “Two Plus Two Magazine - Poker Strategy Articles” even. So you go to click on an article and the URL is “http://twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue44/brokos_0808.php”. That isn’t really good, but it’s certainly better than most of the Two Plus Two URLs. Of course the www version works too, but that’s probably just a lack of knowledge on the part of the person doing the linking. Whatever, it could be worse, at least there’s good content on the page. What’s the title? “Two Plus Two Internet Magazine”. That, ladies and gents, is not good. Is the article title in an H1? Nope. Then you see that they actually pull content offline after three issues — see http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue42/older_issues.php. They make the following statement: “We want to treat our authors right, and one way we do that is to allow them full use of their quality work in a timely fashion.” That’s great, but they’re royaly screwing themselves SEO-wise. I can’t imagine authors would care about their content staying up on one of the most powerful poker domains online, but I guess Two Plus Two knows more about author relationships than I do, so I’ll defer to them on that one. One thing I won’t defer to them on is that the title of the “older issues” page is, as of August 11th, 2008, “Two Plus Two Pokercast presented by PokerStars VIP Club”. I know that’s a mistake and they’ll fix it, but that’s just sloppy. Someone should be checking on things like that. On a whole, the whole Two Plus Two content system is really broken from an SEO perspective.
