1st time poster - Existing website dilemma

[beachbum]

Hey guys, I've recently found the forums here after doing some research about how to be a better poker affiliate. After another failed business in an unrelated industry, I've been looking at my website, tourney.com, to see how I can develop it further. Actually, I'm leaning toward a redesign/theme change. Here's why...

For the last several years, our theme has been Poker World Rankings. My partners and I basically came up with a ranking system for B&M tournament poker and created a type of point system. We'd put the results from various WSOP, WPT, etc. tourneys in our mySQL database. From this database, we'd get thousands of dynamically created pages of a few different types: 1) a Rankings page, which was basically like a 'standings', 2) a Schedules page, that contained a separate page for each tournament's results, and 3) Stats pages, that would be created for each individual player who cashed in one of these tourneys.

As it sounds, our database became pretty large as we entered more of these tourney results into it. Over the last 6 months or so, the Yahoo Slurp and Cuil bots have been getting "stuck" in our site from time to time, and caused our CPU hosting usage to spike and eventually cause our site to be suspended. It actually was this way for several weeks, as we had no luck trying to get a hold of our previous webdesigner.

So I'm at a point now where I'm trying to figure out what to do with the site. I've temporarily removed the above mentioned pages causing the bots problems. We actually didn't update the site's results that well recently, so we don't come up well at all currently on the SERP's. I'm sure our site suspension didn't help either. So it's not like our site is generating any traffic to speak of right now.

Is it worth sticking with this theme? As the DB gets bigger, it takes longer for the Rankings pages to load too, especially since the rankings points are calculated and updated by a complex algorithm. Since the pages were dynamically created using PHP and mySQL, I'm not sure how valuable each one of our pages is, even though over 10,000 pages got generated.

I rewrote the About page on the site to reflect my future plans with it, although I'm not fully convinced in this new direction. If I do go this way, I'll regularly update my blog on there. Also, I'll try to write as many poker articles as I can. I'll add some other stuff like poker widgets, calculators, feeds, etc. Basically make it a site with lots of content over time.

Anyway, I'd love some input on what I should do with the site:
- Should I just restrict access to these problem bots through a robots.txt file and keep the tourney theme, or will the size of the DB catch up with me eventually? If I do stay this route, I'll probably need to get permission from whatever source I use to get the results of each poker tourney. Also, I can still add the other content ideas mentioned above if I continue with this theme.

- Or, should I scrap the rankings theme, and just go with a cleaner, less resource intensive site as mentioned in the current About page? The current site has a lot of PHP coding, and every page on there except the homepage pulls it's content from the DB, including text pages like the About page. So, with a new theme, I don't know if I should scrap this complex code and go with something simpler. I'd also need to do a little redesigning with this route too, although I do have some basic HTML experience.

Sorry for the long first post. I looking forward to getting involved more here. Any help on any of these aspects is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Zujo]

Welcome. I believe there is a forum for this type of thing if I got the gist of your post correctly (you are seeking feedback on your site).

[Newjabber]

Its a pretty solid domaine name you got there.
I dont know about using it for ranking since i dont really know if that is something that could actually make you any money, but offcourse its proberly generating some visitors.
I assume you main goal is to make $?

I'm leaning toward a redesign/theme change

Yeah it could deffitnely need some changes. Not crazy with the current design and navigation.

You could have a section with rankings, but i think i would use that domain for actually hosting private tournaments and some freerolls.
Something with a leaderboard, and maybe slowly build a community.
And reviews focusing on tournaments offcourse.
You could also add a freeroll and guaranteed tournament schedule from Online Poker Freerolls Schedule - Free Poker Money :: FREEROLLS MONITOR

[jdwanchalk]

Looks wonderful.
voguesale.com

What I'll never understand is why these people bother. Ok, you might get some hits, but I can't imagine anyone buys from these shady spam sites.

[GottaTryIt]

Hi,

I like the domain but not the site I'm affraid.

A redesign is deffinetly needed but I think you need to have a rethink and build a site that lives up to what visitors are expecting to see.

Your about page that highlights future ideas for the site focuses on cash games where the site is called "tourney" so that makes no sense and away we click to go somewhere else.

It woud be a great resource for online poker tournaments.

If it were me here's what I would do:

1: Pick top 5 poker rooms.

2: List tournaments under buyin amount i.e freerolls $1 to $5 and $5 to $10 etc.

Under each of those tabs show a list of the best online tournaments that suit the players budget, show times in various zones which will help immensely.

3: Have some information about each of the featured tournaments, most of these wil be set in the daily/weekly schedules, a brief outline on each, how many runners, quality of play, basic strategy, past results, players to look out for etc.

4: Make money from it.

That's what I would use it for anyway, a nice tab for satellites would also be a good idea.

**Featured Tournament**
Regular $10,000 Overlay This friday
Added Value Not To Be Missed

I'm sure you get the jist. That's just my thoughts anyway, good luck!

[corpfan1]

What's the domain name?

[Newjabber]

I've been looking at my website, tourney.com, to see how I can develop it further. Actually, I'm leaning toward a redesign/theme change. Here's why...

[beachbum]

Thanks guys for all your feedback so far.

@ Zujo: I guess it could be considered a site review, but I really don't have any content to review since I kind of dismantled half the site in order to prevent an automatic suspension again. It's kind of a blend between New Affiliate Questions, Poker SEO Questions, and Web Design/Coding/Technical Questions, as well as site feedback.

@ Newjabber: Yeah, the goal is definitely to make $ . In the past when we were getting our best traffic, we got it through hits on Bio names (i.e. Tuan Le) and would get a lot of random hits for poker players who cashed at the WSOP, for example, and their names would be in our DB. So if your friend John Smith got 12th place at the $1500 NLHE tourney at the WSOP, he'd have a Stats page created for him showing this result with his name in the URL and page title.

@ GottaTryIt: I just decided to target the site mainly toward cash games since they're something that I know the most about and would be interested and qualified to create content about. I realize it doesn't match up well with the URL, but I have a pretty good URL here and would like to take advantage of it. I've read through threads on here where people seem to recommend creating a big, content rich site instead of smaller niche sites, so that's what I had in mind to do. Maybe the URL doesn't work well with this strategy though.

In general, do you think the past poker world ranking theme I had was any good? Does Google value the tens of thousands of dynamically created pages very much?

[TheDonk]

I'm not sure I understand the confusion on this. The domain is Tourney.com...it should be a site for everything to do with tournaments. The way you're doing it seems like going through the side window instead of the front door.

Types of tournaments, best Sunday tournaments, ftops, wcoop, sit n go, and on and on and on.