Views on Pokerroom.com linking strategy?

[Webzcas]

I've been having a look at pokerroom.com and trying to analyse why they have ranked for so long as #1 for online poker room and #1 for online poker.

Yes they do have a lot of backlinks, but then again so do many other sites. However on checking their robot.txt file it seems they disallow all Search Engine Robots from their link partner pages. Meaning anyone trading recip links with them, won't actually get credited with a link back as se bots are not allowed to crawl those pages. So in all intents and purposes they are tricking innocent webmasters into providing 1 way backlinks to them.

In my view this practice is quite unethical. What does anyone else feel about this?

Check out their robot.txt file.

http://www.pokerroom.com/robots.txt

[Chatmaster]

I have to agree

Disallow: /main/page/search/links/

Looks very suspicious!

[maxlevine]

I believe the path /main/page/search/links/ indicates that everything in the directory "links" is disallowed but not in the levels above. Their exchange links directory is not in the search directory. If they wanted to disallow links, correct syntax would have been: Disallow: /links/

If I'm wrong, contacting the sites linking to them would surely be the thing to do as this web site should then be blacklisted.

Max

[Webzcas]

Max thanks for your feedback on this. Maybe the case of me jumping the gun hence I wanted to know what others think. Just seems a bit 'dodgy' to me.

[Chatmaster]

I have to agree with Webzcas here

I still feel it is dodgy, the links page you are refering to are not the same one as the one disallowed, however their is no tangable proof of what is going on here, only way to know is if you are a link partner to them. This however will be difficult to proof as they have so many backlinks! On the other hand it can be that they simply don't want their members detail revealed to the world. But the fact that they rank so well for so long seems fishy.

[maxlevine]

Chatmaster,

there are many more aspects to SE optimization than reciprocal links. I remember Pizza Hut was actually paying big bucks to search engines to get the top position (don't know if they still do).

At any rate, even if that site was not linking to their partners, it would not justify their ranking. It would explain their partners lousy performance but, unless some of those partners were in a position to actually compete with them for keywords, it does not affect the popularity of the mentioned site. It is unethical and should be blacklisted in any exchange links programs... if it is found to be the case.

Max

[Webzcas]

there are many more aspects to SE optimization than reciprocal links.

Quite, but off site optimisation factors are weighted over 50% when it comes ranking highly. Hence Google Bombing came about

At any rate, even if that site was not linking to their partners, it would not justify their ranking.

It would help, as one way ranking is more important that recip linking.

[maxlevine]

Originally Posted by Webzcas

It would help, as one way ranking is more important that recip linking.

That is true. But its ranking based on linking popularity is also determined by the partners site popularity. One web site could have 200 sites linking to it but if their popularity is limited, it will not achieve very high ranking. Otherwise, we would all create a hundred fake sites linking to our main site.

If the site in question would have links from poker.com, partypoker.com, and so on, that would be an aspect to consider.

Max

[Chatmaster]

Hi maxlevine

It sounds like we all have a good understanding of SEO. As far as Triciprocal and reciprocal links are concerned. The moment you change a reciprocal link to a one-way backlink you are talking heavy benefits. I have a magnitude of sites ranking #1 on backlinks alone. Backlinks means everything when it comes to SEO, so I believe if they are cheating on their reciprocal links they will definately benefit BIG. However, there is no way of confirming this unless we can find someone that are a link partner of them, that can tell us where their backlinks are. As far as I can see it seems legit, but in my years as SEO specialist I have learned not to trust anybody.

[sharpgambler]

User-agent: *
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /pokah/links/
Disallow: /pokah/links/index.php
Disallow: /main/page/games/mobile/intro
Disallow: /home/new_index.php
Disallow: /home/new_signup.php

If their links directory is /pokah/links then they are tricking webmasters. That page is PR5 but is disallowed for search engines. Maybe they have a strategy here.