I was on Jeremy’s poker affiliate radio show last week with Michael Martinez. I thought I’d write some answers to some of the questions that were on the agenda for the show here on my blog, so that they aren’t exclusively “poker SEO radio” issues.

What’s the value of getting a DMOZ link? How do you get a poker site accepted to DMOZ?

A DMOZ link is a valuable link, but it’s not as valuable as it used to be. As Michael pointed out on the show, the search engines used to begin their crawl of the Internet from DMOZ, but now it’s a lot more likely that they have a database of trusted sites at which they begin their crawls. Not having a DMOZ link is no barrier to success as a poker webmaster either.

Getting a poker site accepted to DMOZ begins with building a site that qualifies for a DMOZ listing. Most don’t. The most important requirement for a DMOZ listing is unique content. So if your site consists of 10 pages of poker room reviews that are basically just disguised ads and 10 pages of rules for poker games, then don’t even bother submitting because you’ll never get listed. And if you do have unique content on your poker site, make sure that it’s easy to find. DMOZ editors don’t have time to search for the 3 unique articles you have on your site. First of all, your site should have dozens if not hundreds of unique pages of content. And second, that content should be front and center and easy to find.

The best strategy from a poker SEO perspective, as it relates to DMOZ, is to build the best, most unique poker resource that you can. Then submit it and forget it. (And don’t submit it before it’s a robust website.)

Are directory listings good or bad for poker sites?

Like everything else, it depends on whether they’re good directories or bad directories. There’s no real point in submitting to a lot of useless directories. But useful directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, JoeAnt, BOTW, and GoGuides are good, sure.

Eric Ward likes to say that directory links should be looked at in the context of your site’s backlink profile. Imagine a continuum where on one end you have a brand new website with 0 links. On the other end, you have CNN, which has tons of backlinks. Getting a DMOZ or BOTW link for CNN isn’t going to make a big difference to their traffic, search engine or otherwise. But that site on the other end of the spectrum, the one with 0 links, can benefit significantly from some good directory links.

Figure out where you are on the continuum and behave accordingly.

How important is Google PR to a poker webmaster?

Google PR has always been important and it still is. But most webmasters don’t understand that toolbar PR is next to useless. It’s only updated periodically, and the 1 to 10 range doesn’t really provide any more than the most general gauge of what a site’s actual PR is. Since you can’t see it, and you can’t measure it, you’re going to have a really hard time managing it.

So keep Google PR in the back of your mind, but don’t let it rule what you do on a daily basis. Keep your focus on creating unique, high-quality poker content, and spend an hour or two per day building links to that content. (Or designate one day a week as “linkbuilding” day, and spend the rest of your week working on content.

Content should always be at least 80% of your focus.

Should a poker webmaster use rel=”nofollow”?

I’ve never used nofollow for anything. I never drank the PR sculpting Kool-Aid. (I ignore most SEO advice.)

If you want to use the rel=”nofollow” tag, I recommend saving it for blog comments, which is what it was originally meant for. I personally vet all comments on all my blogs anyway though, so I don’t even use it for that most of the time.

Is it better to use a category or a subdomain when translating your poker website into other languages?

I’ve always used category folders for translating my poker sites into other languages, but Michael made a good point on the show. If you want to geo-target where your site shows up, then subdomains are probably better.

Where are the best places to get free links?

From good websites, where else?

Start with your own pages and your own websites. Believe it or not, those links count, and you should focus pretty hard on those.

Then hit your friends up for links. Offer them unique content in exchange for links. If you’re friends with the local bar owner, and he hosts a free weekly poker tournament each week, then offer him an article about how to win free poker tournaments at bars. He’ll be glad to get the content, and you’ll get an earned link out of it.

The reality is that there is no such thing as a “free” link. All the links that matter have to be earned.

How do you avoid the sandbox effect with a new poker site?

I’ve always ignored the sandbox effect. It’s just something you have to budget for when you launch a new site. Just go about your business of publishing poker content and promoting that content, and let Google worry about when to un-sandbox you. You’ll save yourself a lot of stress that way. And if you try too hard to get out of the sandbox, then you’ll probably just hurt yourself somehow in the process anyway.

Where is poker SEO going in terms of user data? Where is poker SEO going in terms of latent semantic indexing? Where is poker SEO going in terms of social media?

Search engines are using user data in terms of ranking their results. But there’s not much real point in trying to manipulate this data in any way other than making sure that your pages are as unique and useful and as on-topic as possible. Then let your users do what they do, and let the search engines use that information to do what they do.

Latent semantic indexing is misunderstood as a poker SEO technique. Go read Michael’s article about SEO myths, and pay attention to the part about latent semantic indexing there.

I think “social media” is something of a fad. It might be useful in some respects as a linkbuilding and exposure tool, but I don’t know that it’s something the average poker SEO is going to need to worry about. Optimizing for social media is not the same thing as doing search engine optimization, although you can learn lessons from one skillset that can be applied to another. (Being able to write something compelling in 140 words is a useful skill in SEO too, for example.) Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting post about writing a Twitter post and taking it through multiple iterations recently. The SEO application of that particular demonstrated skill should be obvious.

Is the title element used in a link useful from a poker SEO perspective?

The title element is useful for some users, but I don’t think it does anything to help your search engine rankings. (As near as I can tell, it’s ignored.)

Clarification – the title element that’s used in a link is NOT the same think as a title tag on a page, which is very important for your rankings. The title element that we’re talking about in this question is the one which creates the text when you hover over a link.

Is SEO an art or a science?

It depends on who’s doing it. The way most poker webmasters do SEO, it’s neither.

How do you get a double listing in the SERPs?

That one is pretty easy. Just create two pages on the same subject. And no, you shouldn’t duplicate anything from one page to the other. One technique for this is to create an FAQ page on the subject which supports the content on your main page for the topic.

If you pick up an old domain and it’s been penalized, should you work on it, or start with a new domain?

It depends on how good the domain is. If I owned Poker.org, I would develop it regardless of any preexisting search penalties. Once you’ve turned it into a robust, high-quality website, you can file a reinclusion request and get your penalty lifted.

How will interlinking your own sites affect your rankings?

I’ve always been pretty fearless about interlinking my own sites. For example, I’m happy to tell you that I’ve been working really hard with my writers on my fantasy football section of my football site. But I make sure that when I have multiple sites, then there are good reasons for those multiple sites to exist. It wouldn’t make sense for me to have 100 websites about “poker seo”. But it might make sense to have a site about “poker seo” and another site about “poker linkbuilding”. And yeah, I’d link those two sites to each other.

A lot of poker webmasters just create additional websites as link sources for their other sites, and they don’t take the trouble to give those new sites reasons to exist beyond that. You can guess how well that works as a crosslinking strategy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 9:32 am and is filed under Duplicate Content, Google, Poker Blog SEO, Poker Content, Poker Forum SEO, Twitter . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.