Page Review Request

[PROFRBcom]

Hello Everyone,

I'm pretty new to AGD, but I've been around the other affiliate forums for a couple years, mostly GPWA. Now that I'm here, I was hoping I could ask the community a favor. You see, I help run an affiliate website, but more than anything I am a professional poker player. The site itself, Professional Rakeback, caters to poker players and their interests and focuses mainly on the US markets.

Despite the fact that this site was originally created as a "VIP poker affiliate" site, the focus has drastically changed over the years. We now use the site to attract all types of poker players, recreational and professional. In fact, the vast majority of sign ups we get are recreational, aka net deposit, poker players.

I've been learning how to run this website (poorly) since 2006 when it was created. And the site has some authority and gets a bit of traffic. However, we know there is huge room for improvement.

For example, recently, we've gone around and been optimizing image sizes on our highest traffic pages. By the way, we found a tool called RIOT (Radical Image Optimizer Tool) which has done wonders for reducing our image file sizes that I thought were optimized beforehand using paint and gimp 2.0.

Now we'd like to work on improving one of our best money pages: http://professionalrakeback.com/Offshore-USA-Friendly-Online-Poker-Sites-Guide

We have a few images to alter and optimize, and a little bit of review text to change, but before I rolled out those little fixes, I wanted to see what the community here has to say about this particular web page and what can be done to improve its google rankings, usability, conversions, and overall money making potential.

Site is run on Drupal 8 / Apache if I'm not mistaken. I have no control over this as an old poker playing buddy hosts the site for us, more or less for free. This is another issue we need to address, getting more control over our website, but for now we have to ignore those issues (suggestions welcomed via PM if anyone is a drupal expert and has a clue what sort of hosting we need!)

 

[Frank]

The keyword poker is used 136 times, all your outbound links are passing juice including affiliate links, it might warrant a bear hug from the Panda, site is not responsive and lots of bolded keywords which was fine a few years ago but it looks unnatural nowadays also h1 tag is fairly long though sometimes myself i am guilty of this. conversions wise you should have some nice big buttons or clickable CTA, text is real small and you can almost bypass it trapped within all the other text.

 

[PROFRBcom]

Frank,

Thank you for your response. I value your contributions on this site and other affiliate forums. I do think you have made an incorrect assessment however in at least one respect.

• Our outbound links are almost always coded "nofollow" or "external nofollow" with the exception of very authoritative sites such as Wikipedia, Google, WikiHow, etc. It was my understanding that that was a good practice... to not use nofollow on very respectable sites.
  
• Our affiliate links are always set to nofollow/external nofollow, and I can't see any that do not conform to that standard on the page. Am I missing something?

Perhaps you were looking at the links directly under the map? Those links are in fact internal anchor page links that jump to the review of each particular site, and not affiliate links. The affiliate links are text links inside the review paragraphs and they all appear to be nofollow/external nofollowed as far as I can see.


With that out of the way, I'd like to discuss some of the points you've made:

1) "The keyword poker is used 136 times" -- The article is 3,635 words long. In no way has poker been purposefully added to keyword stuff, however, upon further review, that does perhaps seem excessive. However, theuse of the word "poker" is somewhat unavoidable when speaking about "The Winning Poker Network" and "Grand Poker Room" and a number of other rooms in which Poker is part of the proper name. I suppose the question is, how bad is this figure and what do you think would be a more optimal number? I'm sure a dozen or two instances of poker could be trimmed out if it were made a priority.

2) "Unresponsive site" -- Nothing I can do about that until we get new hosting and as the site has been handled and hosted by a friend since 2006, I really don't even know what we need or where to begin. Hence the last part of the OP as well as all the image optimization to reduce load times. Google PageSpeed Insights does give the page an 87 out of 100 on desktop and, due to the aforementioned hosting problems, there is nothing I can do to enable compression, minify js or css, etc. This is about as good as it can get at this point unfortunately.

3) "Bolded Keywords" -- I have no issue unbolding them, however, it seemed that our rankings improved when we did that years ago, in one of the first revisions after the article was created. My only fear is that removing them might suddenly have an adverse effect. I suppose the mentality of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" comes to mind. Other than looking somewhat unnatural at this time, do you think it could be negatively affecting our SERPS? We thought it was the opposite quite frankly...

4) "h1 tag too long" -- Same thing comes to mind... if it ain't broke. I don't wish that to sound like an excuse, so I am willing to revisit it. In fact, the first h2 is too long and ends up wrapping around. I hate how it looks visually, but we rank for keywords in that tag. Is it really wise to change it and risk possibly hurting our rankings?

5) "conversions wise you should have some nice big buttons or clickable CTA" -- I agree. We need something other than the text links inside the paragraphs. I suppose since the page is so big it's more of a question of where to put the damned things.

6) "text is real small and you can almost bypass it trapped within all the other text." -- Which text are you referring to exactly?


THANK YOU for your help!

 

[Frank]

And again the old saying goes if it's not broke don't fix it, I also feel that a lot of sites built before a certain year can or did use certain things which worked/works but does not apply to fresh new sites built, if you are still ranking well and pulling traffic too many modifactions might throw the page off it's position, however mobile friendly would be your biggest advantage here "The text i was talking about was the link text".

 

[byebyebaby]

I like the page, but as mentioned before, maybe make the font a little bigger, the main text font I mean.
It is small. I can read it fine, but some people might have a problem.

 

[byebyebaby]

Oh and sorry, forgot, why not make the banners above (like BetOnline Chico Poker Network) a link.

 

[PROFRBcom]

Oh and sorry, forgot, why not make the banners above (like BetOnline Chico Poker Network) a link.

The main reason for not doing that is because we have multiple sites under many of the networks. Those banners were created by an old editor. I think what I'm going to do is remake them and change up the structure of the opening banners a bit. Gonna toy with some mock ups today. I think you have a valid point that that could be used to increase clicks & conversions.

RE: Font. We've never had a customer tell us the font was too small. With that said, I suppose anyone who wasn't a customer would have self-selected and not become one! Whatever font size is used is the default font size for this Drupal install. I can only imagine the PITA it will be to increase the font on the entire page by digging around in the HTML.

The font increases has been mentioned for mobile users. This leads me to my next point. For poker, I don't think it's terribly important. Very few sites that we offer, offer mobile poker play. As such, it stands to reason that few people would be signing up on a phone, only to come back later on a desktop and download the software to play online poker. Now that I think about it, only 2 sites we work with have mobile poker, and of those, only one of them we can advertise since Bodog/Bovada has a ban on poker advertising *sigh*

 

[TheGooner]

The keyword poker is used 136 times, all your outbound links are passing juice including affiliate links, it might warrant a bear hug from the Panda, site is not responsive and lots of bolded keywords which was fine a few years ago but it looks unnatural nowadays also h1 tag is fairly long though sometimes myself i am guilty of this. conversions wise you should have some nice big buttons or clickable CTA, text is real small and you can almost bypass it trapped within all the other text.

I agree with Frank's assessments.

1/ Poker is 3.7% of the total word count (136 of 3635) - and any way you look at it this is probably going to be considered keyword stuffed (whether you meant it or not).
2/ The page is somewhat unresponsive - so quite unreadable for mobile phone but good for desktops.
3/ Font is small but I notice with small phone sizes it seems to increase (is that a recent change?)
4/ Links are so subtle as to be almost hidden. You're using blue text - but you also use blue text on unclickable icons (eg Very fast payout. Highest Rewards)

In addition I would also add :

5/ Why have poker scam sites listed above the sites you recommend?
If you must list the scam sites have them at the bottom of the page - unless it's the thing you want people to concentrate on?

6/ It's a bit long winded.
You need to summarise or group the paragraphs with headings or find someway to avoid the Too Long Didn't Read syndrome.
Most people want to find that they're looking for quickly - the writing IS informative - but dry - many readers will click away.

If this was my content - then I'd have broken it up into 3-5 pages of content with a summary page linking to the various sections.

 

[PROFRBcom]

1/ Poker is 3.7% of the total word count (136 of 3635) - and any way you look at it this is probably going to be considered keyword stuffed (whether you meant it or not).

OK, at this point, two people who's posts I've come to respect over the years say the word count of "poker" is too high, then it's going to get whittled down in my next revision. Thanks!

2/ The page is somewhat unresponsive - so quite unreadable for mobile phone but good for desktops.

Again, mobile, just not much there for us as US poker affiliates, not top priority. But you're right, google pagespeed insights scores the page poorly on mobile, a score of low to mid 60s.

"good for desktops" ???, not really sure how to interpret unresponsive page being good for desktop?

3/ Font is small but I notice with small phone sizes it seems to increase (is that a recent change?)

I don't have the slightest clue how to do that, so no, nothing has been changed unfortunately.

4/ Links are so subtle as to be almost hidden. You're using blue text - but you also use blue text on unclickable icons (eg Very fast payout. Highest Rewards)

A former editor designed those icons and you know what, it never crossed my mind that the text was blue. If I had to guess that was done to match the blue theme of the site, but I'll be damned, that is a great suggestion and will be changed in the next revision. Thanks!

5/ Why have poker scam sites listed above the sites you recommend?
If you must list the scam sites have them at the bottom of the page - unless it's the thing you want people to concentrate on?

I was hoping someone would mention this as it's been bugging me since I've taken the time to think about this page some more. I believe the original idea behind place the scam site warning was credibility. To let the user know that we were looking out for their best interests. However, that was before the page started ranking well in Google; when it was merely a guide for us to recruit referred customers.

The page was written for a more advanced user originally, but now, thanks to the various search engines, the type of player that signs up there is quite recreational in nature. I think we'll try moving it to the bottom as well. Or maybe putting it onto it's own page/article; however I'm hesitant to do that b/c it would remove so much text from the article and I don't want to risk effing up our rankings with large changes to the text...

6/ It's a bit long winded.
You need to summarise or group the paragraphs with headings or find someway to avoid the Too Long Didn't Read syndrome.
Most people want to find that they're looking for quickly - the writing IS informative - but dry - many readers will click away.

Yup, I think you're correct. We probably do lose some people with TLDR; issues. I think we'll probably trim at least a couple dozen words off simply by removing "poker" in redundant cases. From there, we can give it a good reread and take out some of the more verbose language.

Not sure what to do about it being "dry" as it's meant to be informative and I hate to come off as "spammy!! SPAMMY!!! CLICK HERE!!" mentality. It's a weird spot b/c the site was originally intended to be a VIP type poker site, bringing in other poker pros such as myself. But it has evolved into something that brings in a decent chunk of recreational players, so it makes it hazy as to what to really go after...

If this was my content - then I'd have broken it up into 3-5 pages of content with a summary page linking to the various sections.

Unfortunately, at this point, I don't think we can break it up into different pieces without risking losing everything we've built up with regard to that page and it's search engine footprint. I'm not sure how to even go about doing such a thing if it were possible...


Thanks Gooner, I appreciate your responses!

 

[TheGooner]

You're welcome PROFBcom - and I didn't mean for it to come off as too negative ...
I just quickly listed the points that I thought might need action or at least consideration.
Perhaps too quick.

To cover off some of your comments to my issues ....

a/ Non-responsive and so good for desktop ...
What I meant was the layout worked well on a desktop - and being non-responsive means you will know exactly how it renders on most PCs.
Responsive layouts can be a pain-in-the-ass when they wrap around all over the place.
;-)

b/ Writing is Dry.
Informative certainly.
Perhaps lacking a little in personality, quirky humour or opinion - something to give the reader a smile?
Not an easy thing to do - but just a little turn of phrase or something?

c/ Breaking Content.
Agreed that you should not do that now - especially if you have traction in the SEs.
But splitting content into topical nuggets works well to avoid TL : DR syndrome, enables specific keyword targeting, and my experience is readers like 1000 words max,
as more than that can seem too overwhelming and people click away LONG before the bottom..

Something to consider for future works?

SUMMARY (Which I didn't do before)
-------------------------------------------------
I think that the content is good - it's informative - it's original - and it helps players to find good places to play - this is all good.

My points are mainly about technical things, look and feel, handling mobile, and number counts - which is basically window dressing ...

But unfortunately window dressing does matter when getting conversions ... and sometimes it helps to have fresh eyes commenting ...

Anyway, it's a useful good content page, well done - and I hope that the comments helped you to review your work from a different point of view.

Good luck!

 

[Guard Dog]

I really can't add much to the conversation - only because all the points I would make have been made. But I do have to say... GREAT effort here from the team. Love this kind of stuff... affiliates helping affiliates