PartyPoker hit by Google search penalty
Bwin.party could face "substantial financial hit" as revamped poker site is relegated from search engine's top results
PartyPoker has taken a hit to its online visibility with Google no longer ranking the bwin.party poker brand in its related search results, eGaming Review has learned.
Google searches using poker-related terms such as ‘online poker’ or ‘mobile poker’ currently fail to produce any links to the PartyPoker site, and even a search for ‘partypoker’ only returns links to the firm’s .net site.
A spokesperson for bwin.party confirmed to eGR that it was “aware of the situation” and was “working to resolve it”.
And although Google failed to comment on the reason behind PartyPoker’s absence in its search listings, Stacey Cavanagh, SEO expert and head of search at Tecmark, said the issue was likely to be the result of a violation of Google’s linking guidelines.
“The number of links pointing back to your website from other websites has been and continues to be a huge factor in terms of where you rank in Google for certain search terms,” Cavanagh said.
According to Cavanagh, websites have historically built Google visibility through the purchasing of links from networks to increase their search ranking, a practice which Google prohibits and has increased efforts to prevent.
In recent years, Google has developed increasingly sophisticated software to detect link building and has the ability to apply algorithmic penalties to websites in order to prevent such abuse.
“It looks like this is likely the cause of the lost visibility for PartyPoker.com,” Cavanagh said. “They have a lot of what Google is likely to deem manipulative inbound links,” she adds.
The issue has provided an unwanted headache for PartyPoker, which has struggled to gain traction since its re-launch in September last year.
And although there are no financial ramifications for breaking Google’s linking guidelines, a loss of organic traffic is likely to have a knock-on effect.
“Losing all of your Google organic traffic is, for most sites, a substantial financial hit – many have to replace this traffic through paid search, for example,” Cavanagh said.