Newbodog.com, What Happened to Bodog?

Online casino, sports book, and online poker company Bodog.com has been doused with some legal hot water and forced to relaunch their site on a new domain NewBodog. It appears that what happened was Bodog was being sued for a patent infringement claim. When Bodog's counsel failed to appear in court, a summary judgment was issued and one of the terms was for seizure of all of the Bodog.com owned domains, all 3000 of them.

From an SEO perspective, this is a sites worst nightmare. Bodog.com has maintained solid rankings in top terms in the poker industry to include poker and online poker. Newbodog.com will essentially be starting from scratch in one of the most competitive SEO areas, losing literally years of work.

Though Bodog and Calvin Ayre the founder are claiming: "We are working to resolve any remaining issues on the temporary site as soon as possible, and fully expect to have our original sire back up shortly.", it seems like there are no quick fixes in this situation.

These guys will have updates and information on Bodog and NewBodog and a page about NewBodog as well.

Yesterday NewBodog.com and Bodog hit Google Trends, with Bodog coming in at #33 and showing at #50 for today.

The case was in the State of Washington, King County Superior Court, Case #07-9-21969-8 dated 8/1/07.

Users Ignore Banners But Focus On Text, Faces, And Cleavage

Eyetracking research on the blindness of online users to banner ads. The short of it is, users ignore anything that looks like an ad. What works? Incorporating your message into the content, using no feeling of separation from the flow of the page. Also, keeping these items that Jakob shares which have been shown in eyetracking studies to be the 3 most important design elements for attracting eyeballs:

• 
  
• Plain Text
• Faces
• Cleavage and other "private" body parts

Yahoo Dynamic URLs Tool

Yahoo Site Explorer recently released a new tool called the Dynamic URLs Tab. It allows webmasters to have some control over how URLs for their site are being crawled and displayed. It seems a very useful tool for tracking codes and session ids, items that might not be able to be blocked(from being indexed) via Noindex tags. I've been keeping my eyes open on the forums discussing Yahoo topics and have found little thus far about anyone's experience using the Dynamic URL Tool. I submitted some changes today and we will see what effect it will have. With Yahoo stating that the have 'slowed down' their crawl, I expect it might take about a week to really gage the impact.

College Students Trust Google Rankings

This study, In Google We Trust, though only done on 22 students, seems to indicate that they are heavily influenced in their decision to visit a site, based on the ranking of the site alone. The students were more likely to click on the top results, even if the lower ranked results more closely matched their intended query. Great news for SEO.

PPC Ad Click Thru Rate

A new study published in IEEE called Sponsored Search: Is Money a Motivator for Providing relevant Results? analyzed overall click through rates for Paid Search ads in the major search engines. Their results showed a 16 percent overall click thru rate on PPC ads. Brief summary article about the search study.

More Query Data From Google Webmaster Tools

I haven't seen anyone mention this yet but it is worth noting, Google greatly expanded the query data available from Webmaster Tools.

In Google Webmaster Tools you can look up your query data, Top Search Queries and Top Search Query Clicks. There is a link which enables you to download the data for your URL to a spreadsheet. While this has been around since February of this year, what I noticed today is a huge list of query stats that include not just searches involving the homepage, but also all the subfolders for your site that Google has indexed, broken down by country for each and also by Google search source, ie mobile, directory, web, or image. Pretty cool.

Go to: Google Webmaster Tools>Statistics>Query Stats>Download all query stats for this site (including subfolders)

My Page Is Blocked With Robots.txt But Still Shows In Results.

There is much confusion on this point.

Q: "If I have some of my site pages blocked in my robots.txt file why do they still show up in Google results?"

A: Robots.txt does not remove your page from the Google Index, it only stops Googlebot from crawling your specified pages. If you have a page showing up in the search results and you apply a robots restriction to that page and that page has no external links, typically that page will disappear from the results. If that page does have external links, the page may continue to show up in the results even after the Robots exclusion is applied. Two easy ways to check that the page is no long being crawled by Googlebot is by looking at your site logs or looking at the search result itself and you will notice that there will no longer be a cache version of that page(there could be other reasons for no cache version). Also, the result will no longer show a description.

The way to 'remove' a page from the index or showing up in the results is to place a noindex meta tag on the page and keep the robots.txt exclusion as well. Another, potentially more dangerous option, is to use the Google URL Removal Request tool in the Google Webmaster Tools for your website where you can remove entire sites, directories, or even specific pages.

Details from Google Webmaster Help Center on Robots.txt and Meta Noindex

Details on Google URL Removal Request from Google Webmaster Central Blog