Poker Stars hit with Google penalty.

[scottmc]

No longer showing up for [poker] [online poker] and home page doesn't show up for [pokerstars] [poker stars].

Seems to be a slightly different penalty than -50 penalty handed out recently as non-home pages do show up for some searches. Most likely they have been penalised for buying links.

I understand why all the crappy poker affiliate sites buy links (little risk, big reward) but I don't understand why a site with so many organic links and rankings would risk them for relatively little gain.

[Trikkur]

wow, I wonder what they did. I thought Randy did their SEO and he's a huge white hat advocate to my knowledge. Google is crazy sometimes. This is going to cost them pretty big though.

[PPP]

It's absolutely for sure not a penalty. It's crappy website design issues.

Any webmaster looking for problems would have seen the problems this past week in about sixty seconds.

[new]

[PPP]

Originally Posted by new

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3687528.htm

?????????

[punchtheclock]

Originally Posted by PPP

It's absolutely for sure not a penalty. It's crappy website design issues.

Any webmaster looking for problems would have seen the problems this past week in about sixty seconds.

Care to share these with us? or did you just want us to feel your power?

[Randy]

I haven't done any SEO consulting for PokerStars in about 18 months or so. PokerStars.com has internal pages which still rank very well for some very competitive phrases though. I don't think the penalty to their homepage is related to any kind of black hat activities.

Originally Posted by Trikkur

wow, I wonder what they did. I thought Randy did their SEO and he's a huge white hat advocate to my knowledge. Google is crazy sometimes. This is going to cost them pretty big though.

[hazo]

http://www.pokerscout.com/news/Poker...by-Google.aspx

[PPP]

Originally Posted by punchtheclock

Care to share these with us? or did you just want us to feel your power?

Sorry, but some specific things are too valuable to just give away, but see below.

Originally Posted by hazo

http://www.pokerscout.com/news/Poker...by-Google.aspx

I suppose you can't blame pokerscout or Nat Arem for jumping to conclusions, but first... Pokerstars still ranks #2 for [poker games], #5 for texas hold'em, etc. So there is clearly, definitely no penalty. The pokerscout post is nothing but uniformed conclusion-jumping.

Okay, let me put it this way.... guess what would happen if some inept-o multi-billion dollar poker site last week somehow put a "noindex" tag (!!!!!!!) on its main page last week? Well, that page would drop out of the search results!

Pokerstars.net should reappear in a day or two. .com had multiple screwups which may take longer for it to reappear.

[GCPguy]

Originally Posted by PPP

Okay, let me put it this way.... guess what would happen if some inept-o multi-billion dollar poker site last week somehow put a "noindex" tag (!!!!!!!) on its main page last week? Well, that page would drop out of the search results!

That's exactly what it is. Sometime last week I went to PS and I noticed that all the links on their homepage were nofollow (showing up red in SEO for Firefox). I was like WTF?

Guess the new PokerStars SEO Intern is now looking for a new job. I'm sure Full Tilt is hiring to fix the affiliate login page.