Requesting a quick site review

**MarkConner** · 27 January 2011, 3:17 am

Hi guys,

I'm posting this here since I don't have access to the private "Site reviews" section of the forum.

I've launched this website a little over a month ago; it is the first webpage I've ever made. I realize that conversion won't be special, but I liked the idea and it seemed like something I could get working with right away, just to start learning.

The thing is, after google's last PR update (or at least I'm assuming this is the cause), I've dropped considerably for a few of my keywords. For example, "Melanie Iglesias" - ranked 3rd before, now I'm nowhere to be found in the first 30 SERPs. Same for "Chantel Mcnulty", and a few others.

I know that this has happened to many other webmaster, so I'm not really concerned yet. However, since I'm just starting out, I have no real way of telling if the drop was really associated with google's changes, or if I've simply done something bad in terms of SEO.

If someone with experience could take a look and let me know what they think, this would help me sleep more lightly at night

Thanks in advance for any help!

The link is in my signature.

**DaftDog** · 27 January 2011, 8:58 am

A cross between a poker site and a soft porn site. Not sure if the poker rooms you promote will appreciate that. Do you own the rights to the photographs or have permission to reproduce them on your site, or have you just copied them from the web?

Interesting site to browse, can't say I'll have poker on my mind though.

**MarkConner** · 27 January 2011, 10:15 am

Hi Ixian, thanks for the review. My answers/comments:

1) the poker rooms I've registered at so far (Victory, Full Tilt, Stars, Everest) didn't have a problem with the website. Let's hope it is the case for the other sites.

2) I do not own the rights to the pictures; since they were used by everyone on their websites I assumed that it is fine as long as I do not distort any watermarks present on the pictures. I thought this is what the watermarks are for - to let visitors know who took the picture. Some websites prohibited copying their pictures, either through a notice or a javascript that blocked right clicks on the pictures, in these cases I didn't copy the pictures of course.

3) I realize poker doesn't go through your mind, but I do believe that's ok. It should still, in my opinion, be of interest to poker players primarily, and not just anyone looking for a "soft porn" site.I think there is way too much content duplication online at the moment (everyone talks about unique quality content, but really, 99.9% of it is the exactly the same, only written a different way, in my opinion) so I thought this would be something unique and fresh.

Please keep in mind that I am mostly trying to rank high for the names of the various poker girls listed in my pictures/biographies section. And that was really my original question actually, sorry I didn't make it clear

So let me rephrase: in your professional opinion, do you see anything to fix, SEO wise, in the biographies and girl profiles?

Thanks again for your help.

**davemerry** · 27 January 2011, 5:27 pm

Hi Mark,

I must say, you have done a pretty good job with the optimisation so far, and not often I say that! Only a few on page suggestions that I would put forward, and none of them by any means major.

1. You should create Meta descriptions for the pictures and biography pages, although this may not automatically boost your rankings it certainly won't harm them. The main benefit to this is to provide an aesthetically pleasing description in the results pages to users, resulting in a better CTR (click through rate).

2. Another thing, again not major, is that your CSS is all inline when it should be stored externally in order not to waste the spiders time when it should be indexing just your juicy content. For example, just the styling element for one of your H2 attributes is 547 characters long, and thats not including the actual content included!

<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w

oNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-GB</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w

ontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w

ontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m

athPr> <m

athFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m

athPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font

inor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font

inor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font

inor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} </style> <![endif]--> This happens all over the place I am willing to bet around 30-40% of that page is wasted with this when it is not needed. Store it externally and make it clean for robot access!

As I said, nothing major at all - just being picky if you are looking to make improvements to well optimised pages.

Cheers,
Dave M

**MarkConner** · 27 January 2011, 5:50 pm

Hi Dave,

Originally Posted by davemerry

I must say, you have done a pretty good job with the optimisation so far, and not often I say that! Only a few on page suggestions that I would put forward, and none of them by any means major.

I appreciate the feedback and your words are encouraging for me

Originally Posted by davemerry

1. You should create Meta descriptions for the pictures and biography pages, although this may not automatically boost your rankings it certainly won't harm them. The main benefit to this is to provide an aesthetically pleasing description in the results pages to users, resulting in a better CTR (click through rate).

You are right. The only reason I didn't do that is because I'm actually using an image gallery module to upload the pictures, and there is no "meta" description field in there. Having said that, this entire website was made using the Drupal CMS, although I've modified it heavily (at least as heavy as my limited HTML / CSS knowledge permits). I will go ahead and add a meta description for each image throughout the next few days.

Originally Posted by davemerry

2. Another thing, again not major, is that your CSS is all inline when it should be stored externally in order not to waste the spiders time when it should be indexing just your juicy content. For example, just the styling element for one of your H2 attributes is 547 characters long, and thats not including the actual content included!

I'm actually surprised to hear this. Like I said, the page is based on the Open Source Drupal CMS which, from what I know, is extremely well optimized in terms of CSS. As far as I've seen, all styles were stored in an external sheet, and any modifications I've made were done in the external style sheets as well. Could it be that your browser is for some reason displaying the CSS in the source code? Could you give me an example of one or two pages where you came across this problem?

Thanks again for your help!

Mark

EDIT: I can see what you are talking about in terms of CSS. Man, it wasn't like that before, that's for sure. I need to look into it, thanks for pointing it out.

**JoeAdams** · 30 January 2011, 5:53 pm

**davemerry** · 1 February 2011, 1:33 pm

Hi Mark,

As a note, when mentioning meta description element I mean the following http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_el...tion_attribute, rather than the alt attribute.

Let me know how you get on with the changes and feel free to shoot me an email if you require any additional help

Cheers,
Dave

**MarkConner** · 1 February 2011, 1:42 pm

Hi Dave,

Thanks a lot for your tips. I found the reason for the css being stored within the html; it was caused by a text editor that I installer. It seems that whenever I was using one of the options within that editor (bold, creating a link, adding a non-breakable space, and a few others), it would add an excruciatingly large amount of CSS code to "style" these elements.

So instead of using the regular < p>paragraph< /p>, for example, it would style the paragraph with 10 or more different CSS values. I have disabled the editor and I'm going through every single page, manually removing the excess CSS. I've only got around 20% left to do, so should be done tomorrow

thanks a lot for pointing this out! And I will e-main you either way

**itsblitz** · 2 February 2011, 8:29 am

i think this a cool niche, and i had fun looking around your site, its easy to navigate, im not interested in poker so im not sure if this would tempt me to sign up to a poker site but nice job on the site

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