My site usually ranks pretty highly with Google. I normally enjoy a PR5 though sometimes I slip down to PR4. Well imagine my surprise when I noticed that I had slipped down to PR3. I haven’t really made any major changes so I was a bit baffled.
Doing some sleuthing I was able to discover other poker related sites are experiencing similar problems. The 2+2 whiz kid behind catching Absolute in the cheating scandal, Nat Arem, also picked up on this and noted on his blog that sites like Cards Chat, Poker Source Online, Launch Poker, and Compatible Poker were all being ranked low recently.
I’m not sure if this is Google mucking around with a new algorithm or a sign that Google is going to piss on all poker related websites but you can see the impact of Google’s actions very clearly in the graph below.
That’s about a 50% traffic loss in one day!!!
I’ve been powned by Google.
And the frustrating thing is that nobody seems to have a good answer on why. I get clean traffic to this site. I’m not involved in any sort of dodgy link farms or anything like that. Most of my backlinks are from message boards and blogs and they’re all unsolicited.
Hmmmm . . .
Not sure if this blog does this or not, but some people have said that reporting of paid links from other sites may have something to do with this. Google has stated that if a site buys links on another site and that site does not “no follow” the link, they may penalize.
Same thing happened to us at UpforPoker
From PR5 to PR3 in one day.
Bastards!
When the pricks at Google started fucking over John Chow at the end of October, 2007, I took it as a signal to start shorting GOOG. The stock was over $700 and has never recovered since.
The abovementioned outrageous monopolistic behavior just reconfirms the direction in which this company is heading. To all those affected, any loss in blog ad revenue can be more than made up for with the timely purchase of some GOOG put options.