Online Marketing » Gaming Industry » Advertising Campaign » Search Engine Optimzation » Search Engine Marketing » Sports Betting

About 1 year ago I contacted the fine people at Yahoo to find out why I could never get a client’s site indexed beyond the main index page. After checking to make sure that the site wasn’t in violation of any of their rules I sent an email to Yahoo to discuss my findings.

The only thing that I could discern was that the earliest information regarding this domain was still being listed in several of their directories. Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing but seeing as the site changed ownership and focus back in 1996, the old directory listings are completely wrong.

Provided with this information it was fairly easy for someone at Yahoo to ascertain that this was the issue and I was told that they would address this issue soon. They even went so far as to extend to me an invitation to send in follow up questions to which I only received a standard form email, totally unacceptable! Well it has been a long time now and Yahoo doesn’t seem to want to address this issue.

After a few months of waiting I asked if it would be helpful if I were to resubmit my client’s site to the directories and paid for re-inclusion. Typically – I got the standard form response once again. With this kind of customer service is it any wonder that Yahoo.com is losing market and search share?

My only hope now is that someone over a Yahoo might read this and become concerned enough about their product to try to improve it. While I can’t reveal the site here, as that would not be appropriate to this forum, I can assure those of you who might read this; the site is obviously an old site and probably one that predates Yahoo itself.

If the Yahoo directories are so flawed that it takes more than 11 years to update the information contained within, what good are they? If these old directories are having a negative effect on my client’s site and have been doing so for more than a decade, I can only suggest that if Yahoo refuses to fix this issue then I would strongly suggest caution to those webmasters who were thinking of including their sites within the Yahoo directories.

It would be cool if someone from Yahoo were to contact me through a private email in this forum and follow up on this issue.

Over the past few years we have been hearing more and more regarding Semantic search. As more and more companies try to break this barrier we will undoubtedly see a lot of new beta testing site pop up. For example one of the most recent ones I have heard of, and tried out, is http://www.hakia.com/.

Hakia has released their beta version of “Meaning Based” search engine that is based upon proprietary semantic software. “Meaning based” search, an interesting concept and one that needed checking out so I went over to their site and performed some gambling industry related searches like sportsbook, sports betting and casino. What I received didn’t exactly thrill me.

The things I noticed right off of the bat were the results tended to be based upon having the search queries within the domain name and within the page titles. Also, I noticed a lot of low quality affiliate sites pop up which in my opinion is a step backwards in search.

Using single search phrases or queries was giving fairly standard results so I thought I would type my query in the form of a question so I asked, minus the quotation marks of course, “Which is the best sportsbook?” and again, the results were less than stellar. I received a whole host of sportsbook directory listings and gambling portal sportsbook pages. Seems to me that offering me a bunch of portal site’s opinions on what they think are the best sportsbooks falls a little short of offering me any kind of meaning. Granted, the same search on Google gives me similar results but at least I could find the occasional actual sportsbook within their results.

Bottom line here is that semantic search has a long way to go before it will threaten Google’s share of the search market. I am a firm believer in that the next evolution of search will be in the form of Semantic Search and that when this type of search is perfected it will be closely followed by a break through in true artificial intelligence.

When Google’s purchase of DoubleClick is finalized will Google do the right thing and close down or sell off the DoubleClick division of Performics? Myself I highly doubt it.

Will Google pass on insider information to their newly acquired SEO firm and give their client base an unfair advantage? Perhaps but I doubt it simply because it would be too easy for the new employees to distribute those secrets.

Does becoming a part of the Google family of services mean that Performics will be getting more opportunities with the larger SEO contracts? Probably… from a salesman’s perspective I would think this would be a great selling feature.

So does the purchase of an SEO company by a search engine constitute evil? Does anybody else smell brimstone?

Billionaire investor Sam Zell recently bought Tribune Corp. for 8.2 billion. Sorry – let’s give that number the respect it deserves – 8.2 Billion dollars. Seems like a lot of money to be spending on a medium that seems to allegedly lose money with every edition. Mr. Zell claims that the newspaper business is hemorrhaging money, in part, due to the bad deals newspapers negotiated with search engines.

At a speech at Stanford Law School Mr. Zell suggested that if Google wasn’t allowed to “steal” the newspaper’s content for nothing, Google wouldn’t be nearly as profitable. Now I can’t say anything about how much money Google makes off of freely distributed news content but from my perspective, I don’t go to Google to find my news and I suspect that might be the case for others too.

Google does offer a News Alert service that emails snippets of stories to people and those snippets contain links to the full stories. Most webmasters I know go out of their way to get included in the Google Alert system as it can be profitable in terms of traffic. Does this mean that Mr. Sam Zell wants to remove their websites from the Google Alert system? If he does then I can’t see how that would be helpful to the newspaper’s website’s bottom line. Further to that point I guess it is true… you can’t teach an old dog new tricks Mr. Zell and I hope that the 8.2 Billion you dropped on this venture wasn’t your last 8.2 Billion!

by Les Romhanyi

Natural linking, what is it and how do I get it? More importantly, do I need it? If you run an Internet web presence that you want others to find in the search engines then the answer to the latter is YES!

What is natural linking? That is an easy question to answer. Natural linking occurs when someone places a link to your site from another site. The reason that someone might link to your site is not really important, the fact that they placed the link is the only thing that matters.

Some of the reasons that someone might place a link to your site or to a page within your website are:

• Your site offers some information that supports a fact or reinforces a position contained within another site.
• Your site offers some tools or resources that would be helpful to others.
• Your site contradicts a common misconception that others want use to validate their own views on that topic.
• Your site represents a controversial viewpoint that others might want to showcase for their own purposes.
• Your site is just so very cool that others need to be made aware of it and seeing as my website links to your site, my site must be cool too!

Regardless of the reasons why someone might be linking to your site, these natural links are very important. Even if someone is linking to your site because they think it is a sad joke and they want others to see how bad your site is, it really doesn’t matter.

Knowing that these types of links are important the next question is, “How do you get people to link to your site?” There are several ways you can get people to link to your site with the easiest being, make a useful site. Easier said then done you are thinking eh?

When you think about it, creating a useful site isn’t that difficult, it just requires time. Time to find helpful tools to share with others, time to find sound advice regarding your site’s topic of interest and time to make your site ooze the “It” factor. The amount of time it will take is solely dependent upon how much effort you want to put in to it.

OK, so you finished your site, now what? How do you let people know that your site is ready to amaze others? There are several ways to let people know about your site. If you have a budget set aside you could set up a PPC campaign that may bring in some traffic. You could join groups or forums that share your interest or even better, that are totally opposite to your site’s message or theme. Perhaps one of the best ways is to write articles that others can use on their sites that are seeded with a few well placed links pointing back to your site.

One of the next big trends that is about to take off is, the “Bartered Link”. Bartered links are where you offer space on your site to host an article written by other webmasters, which contain text links to their sites in exchange for a one way link back to your site. Are bartered links considered to be natural links? If they aren’t then they sure do a fine job of mimicking them.

Regardless of the motivation behind someone linking to your site, even if it is because they think your site is bad or your opinion is wrong, just remember this… the fact that they did is all that truly matters as the link is the thing.

About the Author
Les Romhanyi, Port Coquitlam, BC. Canada
les@bigjuicemedia.com

Les Romhanyi is an SEO specialist with many years experience placing websites at the top of all major search engines. Big Juice Media is a Sports Betting Marketing company based in Canada.

While it may not be possible to totally discount reciprocal linking as links form the weave of the web. Given the recent comments by some of the search engine people one can only deduce that the way linking is done between sites is being addressed. Since Google can’t toss out the baby with the bath water, Google and other search engines must try to find a way to deal with this, their mess. Some direct information would be beneficial but seeing as none seems to be forthcoming, then it is left to us, the people who constantly run various tests, to offer up our interpretations on what appears to be happening with the engines. Generally, we preface our findings with some kind of qualifier that suggests that the results could also be affected by things beyond our control and should be taken as such, a report on an experiment. How other’s take this information and perhaps generate articles is also beyond the control of the test originators. Rest assured that in most cases the testers are usually offering up their findings in an effort to be helpful and not to discredit anybody’s business model.

How can Google or any other search engine for that matter discern if websites are involved in a reciprocal link building program or not? To my mind there could be a few ways to be discovered as a reciprocal link builder with perhaps the easiest way being the involvement of third party web sites that facilitate the reciprocal link trading or RLT. Every free RLT site I ever joined had as part of their agreement to join, the mandatory link back to the RLT site which in my opinion, would give the search engines a third point for examination to help in the determination on whether a site is involved in a linking scheme or not.

For myself, I will be re-evaluating my participation with free RLT sites as I, like others, try to deal with an issue that really shouldn’t be one.

A few weeks ago I wanted to run a test on how the various search engines reacted to site architecture styles. Not knowing how the engines would react I wanted to use a throw away domain just in case my tests fell outside of the guidelines. I searched the hundreds of registered domains owned by the company I am with and came across one that was perfect as it also let me test the multiple hyphen issue. I won’t give out the domain but it goes something like this;

Dubya dubya dubya dot keyword hyphen hyphen hyphen keyword dot com

After a few days the new site was indexed by the big three so I went in and checked to see how my tests were working. I am happy to say that in one of the big 3 search engines, all of my tests worked just fine as I was receiving top 10 placements for a goodly portion of my targeted keywords. As far as the indexing goes well, that is a completely different story.

MSN and Yahoo both indexed my site just fine but Google on the other hand sure doesn’t seem to like the spammy use of the hyphens. In fact when using the site:DomainCheck for this site it always seems to return a similarly named site that only uses the one hyphen.

Dubya dubya dubya dot keyword hyphen keyword dot com

Conclusion: MSN doesn’t seem to care about the amount or use of hyphens in the domain. Yahoo will index but at this stage seems to apply some form of penalty. Google seems to be a lot pickier about the placement and amount of hyphens used in the domain. As for the use of hyphens in file names all three seem to be fine with them but I did restrict my search to a max of 4 hyphens used per file names.

It seems like ages ago now but when you think about it it really wasn’t that long ago that the Keywords Meta Tag was an important element in the optimization of any page. This powerful tool was so badly abused that it didn’t take too long for the search engines to discount the value of the keywords Meta tag. Spammers, in their effort to manipulate the search engines, began stuffing non-relevant keywords into the tag thus biting the hand that fed them.

To counter this search engines lowered the value of the tag to the point of almost being an unnecessary element in the HTML document. Did you notice the use of the word ALMOST? The keyword Meta tag still carries a little weight when used properly by some of the engines.

The way to properly use this tag is actually only use words that actually appear in the content of your page. If the words and phrases are used on the page then you should include them in the Meta tag. Don’t use too many as there is a limit to the number that can be used. Select the words that are important to the content of the page and only add them once to the Meta tag. If you’re content changes spend a few minutes to update the keywords Meta tag so that you don’t loose the weight on words that are still active in the content and Meta tag.

Granted that the weight of this Meta tag has greatly diminished over the years but it does still carry some weight and weight is weight. The nice thing about weight is that it is cumulative and the little bit you gain from the keywords Meta tag could mean the difference between showing up on page 1 or page 2 for your keywords/phrases.

I have been reading some articles on the state of reciprocal linking. It seems that some people think that the latest Google update has to do with filtering out artificial linking. A visit to Matt Cutts blog revels that Google is going to be aggressively targeting linking schemes. Whether it is reciprocating links, link farming or purchasing links he didn’t say but it seems to me that moderation in anything one does with their website should be the key.

I have another site that contains approximately 60 pages of links that were all part of a reciprocated linking campaign. Now I can’t say whether or not my site has been affected by this latest update but I can say this, all 50+ pages of links still maintain a PR2 rating. If Google is filtering out those links it doesn’t appear that they are assessing any penalties for these reciprocated links pages as they are all still being indexed and are maintaining their page rank.

So if Google isn’t bestowing any weight to these reciprocated links it would appear that the other search engines still are. The site I am talking about and all of my other sites that participate in reciprocating linking, are all doing quite well for their targeted linking text in the other search engines. To me this says that reciprocal linking my not actually work for Google any more but they seem to be working for Yahoo and MSN still. Until reciprocal linking stops working for all search engines then this type of linking remains viable in my opinion.

As you may or may not know I have been providing SEO services for quite some time now. Although my main focus these days is in the sports betting industry but I have also performed this service for many other industries as well. Hell, I cut my SEO teeth so to speak in the adult entertainment industry. I make no apologize for this work or any other work I did in the past as one website is pretty much the same as another to me. I will add this one point – I never knowingly worked on or would consider working on anything that falls outside of the law, well the laws for the country in which I live anyway.

The reason I brought all of that up is to demonstrate that as far as SEO goes I do not simply take on the safe, easy projects. The gambling and adult industries are among the toughest to gain SERP for in any organic search result. Don’t believe me, go ahead and try.

Given the amount of experience I have with the various search engines I have seen a lot of changes over the years. One of the changes I have been witnessing as of late and not liking are the changes that Google has been making. Over the past 18 months or so, Google has been making some rather bizarre choices in their attempt to fight off spam. Now I applaud the efforts but not the results as the results seem to be focused on fighting the spammers and not on improving the results. Granted, getting rid of the spammers should make the results more relevant but when sites that don’t use spam get caught up in spam net, how is that good?

Another area that Google seems to have lost focus on in their attempt to fight spammers is the alleged age delay sandbox. If you don’t know what that sandbox is I’ll briefly describe it. The alleged age delay sandbox is where a new domain is assessed a penalty that prevents the site from ranking in organic searches for all but the most obscure keywords and phrases. How this is supposed to fight spammers I am not sure seeing as the sandbox is only allegedly supposed to exist. The one thing I do know about this effect is that if you are a new site and you need to have it rank right away, the alleged age delay sandbox isn’t affected when applying for Google’s Adwords. Go figure. Is this another example of how Google is alienating the medium it was developed to serve?

If these things are in fact happening at Google, how long will it take the other search engines to act in an effort to counter these failings? In my opinion not too long. From what I have seen it would appear that MSN search is doing just that.

Recently I had the occasion to create a couple of niche sites that fall in the sports betting market. The sites I made both had newly acquired domain names that were both optimized for highly competitive gambling phrases. I had the sites spidered within days of uploading them to their host and within a matter of days they were ranking very high in MSN for their targeted phrases. Not only did these sites rank well but for the most part, the pages maintain their SERP to date.

Another thing that I did notice was that MSN search was indexing the pages more frequently then they were in the past. No sandbox and increased frequency in indexing tells me something, it tells me that MSN search is looking to fill in a hole that Google has created. I for one think that is a good thing as it may force Google to quit taking the easy roads in their fight against spammers.