Rand Fishkin knows how valuable it is for a website to rank high in a Google search. But even he, president of an SEO (search-engine optimisation) firm, was blown away by a proposal he received when he was a panellist at an SEO conference in London, February 2007.
‘Can a poker site rank highly on a Google search using purely white hat tactics – so no spamming, cloaking, link farms or other frowned-upon ‘black hat’ practices?’
Fishkin answered yes, provided the site added other marketing techniques and attracted some media attention.
The rest of the panel scoffed. “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” one chided. After all, this is the cut-throat online gambling sector we’re talking about.
But one poker website owner was intrigued, and he later approached Fishkin. He said, “If you can get us a search ranking in the top five for ‘online poker’ or ‘gambling’ [using white hat methods], we’ll buy that site from you for $10m,” recalls Fishkin, president and CEO of SEOmoz in Seattle. Intrigued but sceptical, Fishkin consulted other gambling site owners at the conference. They said, “If it really does rank there, we might be interested in paying you $10m more.”
A single online gambling customer brings in at least £500 in revenue. With a recent UK Google search of ‘Texas Holdem Poker’ yielding 420,000 results, it’s easy to see why site owners would pay millions to crack the code for Google’s PageRank algorithm.
The stakes are high for online businesses, and Google is the formidable gatekeeper between site owners and their customers. Kinderstart (www.kinderstart.com) is one of a handful of websites that’s sued Google for alleged ’deliberate de-rankings’, although none has been successful to date. A US court dismissed Kinderstart’s claims in March.
Site owners are eager to get their hands on the 75 percent of free Google traffic that’s not affected by AdSense and AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click programs. With 47 percent market share among search engines and three billion search enquiries a month, Google is king.
Comments
Gerry Brannigan said: I would do the white hat tactics for 1 million It its not rocket science It takes time and effort I am still working on my website wwwfix-my-computercouk in regards to SEO and it does take time to rank well There is allot of competition out there especially when your website is based around a common theme such as computer shoprepairs A crucial point that is worth noting is that in Google search you cant pay to rank highly but you can put money behind the effortAnyone who has a website that has a fair amount of traffic should take advantage of advertising Advertising plays a big part online and is a great way to make your website self financingIf you want to know more you can use my contact page on wwwfix-my-computercoukcont
Robert Barton, Powys said: Just use Metacrawlercom or somehtingVote with your fingers
Michael Martinez said: The Google algorithm is not as wrapped up in links as people make it out to be Less-skilled SEOs simply build their strategies on linkage because they dont anything else about search engine optimizationIll be glad to do the poker site for 10 million -- white hat tactics only
Liverbird said: Im sick of searching for specific knitting machine items and google comes up with the same sitesThese are mostly either eBay or sites that either do not sell Brother knitting machines or parts that Im looking for despite the link to caption saying that they do Try it Put Brother knitting machines UK in then click on the first few links I am aware already of the eBay sites I do not want these I wanted other sources If eBay is the only proven option then why do the other sites get in the listing What a waste of my time
Ted Ellis said: There are now so many holiday property advertising websites out there now asking big bucks to advertise properties yet paying no attention to placing appropriate meta tags for the individual advertisers property Such websites are a waste of advertisersmoney as submitting his property page to Google or any other search engine will only rank the site itself higher and not the page on which the individual advert is placed If only the Google algorithm would sandbox such sitesit would protect so many unaware advertisers from wasting their moneywwwholiday-rentscom