Well, those wacky kids over at Google have managed to shuffle me out of my beloved #1 ranking for both pool cue and pool cues.  Drag.  I get why PoolDawg and Ozone keep flip flopping between #1 and #2, but for Google to put a cue manufacturer site up at #1 for pool cues just doesn’t make much sense at all.  Especially for a site that is competely unusable with Firefox and Chrome.  Kudos to McDermott though for nabbing the top spot.

Yiddish Word of the Moment:

Schlameal and Schlamozel (they always go together)
Definition:  Simply put, the schalmeal is the guy who spills the soup on someone and the schlamozel is the guy who gets the soup spilled on him

Well, all I can say is that its a good thing I don’t bet on football for a living.  Looks like I’m off to a stellar start, going 1-4 over the first 5 bowl games.  Since I clearly haven’t learned my lesson about picking dogs for bowl games, I’m going with Boise St. +3 over TCU tonight.

Now the more unfortunate news.  It seems we’ve dropped a spot on Google to #2 for pool cue.  It looks like the increasingly frequent “Google Shuffle” is going on again, as there are new players above the fold who haven’t ever been there (or who haven’t been there in a while).  What’s even more unfortunate is that rankings are eventually going to be a thing of the past, as it seems that Google is going to move to the customized search results.  They’re already putting customized results in (check out that little “Customized based on recent search activity” message in the right corner) and I’m sure will be adding from their Digg style tool in 2009.

Should be interesting to see where the dust settles.

Now you would think that a site that is ranked well on most things billiards related would rank on the term “billiards”, but try as I might, I can’t crack that damn egg.  A part of me knows the primary reason for this is competition.  Billiards is a really competitive keyword and most of the page one sites have the term in their domain.

What’s more frustrating though is the fact that at one point I was able to get the site all the way up to #7 before Google did their semi-regular “Google Shuffle” and knocked us back down into the mid 30s.  Sure, its a lot better than not ranking in the Top 100 (which is where we were six months ago), but I do want to be back in the Top 10.