Playing fair: the importance of ethical search engine optimisation
Like the adult sector with which it is so often compared, online gaming and gambling is one of the Internet's success stories and one of the most competitive, dynamic and imaginative of industries. Many of the innovations and developments that have shaped the Internet business landscape have been led by the gambling sector, from banner advertising to secure transaction processing.
Search engine optimisation (known as SEO) is another classic example. Often described as being search engine-friendly, SEO is the process of designing, formatting and submitting web sites in a way that will ensure the highest possible search engine listings.
It's well worth doing, because more people find a site through a search engine than by any other means. According to research by Forrester, 87% of web visits come from search engines compared with just 9% from banners. With millions of searches carried out every day, just a tiny proportion of that traffic can make all the difference to a site's profitability. As a result, many gambling sites have become masters of search engine optimisation and will have in-depth knowledge of how each search engine work and know exactly how to create and submit a site in order to maximise its chances of a high listing.
But the problem is, some webmasters use that knowledge in order to mislead the search engines into giving their sites a higher ranking than they would otherwise merit. Cloaking (mis-representing the content of a site in order to boost listings) and spamdexing (multiple submissions of the same site) are common practice. A more recent strategy is to buy up expired domains and exploit their link popularity to boost search engine positions. In fact, there are sites and email newsletters entirely devoted to the practice of Ôstealth' optimisation.
Nevertheless, stealth optimisation is a high risk strategy that no reputable business should try. Most search engines have publicly stated their commitment to stamping it out in order to protect the integrity of their indexes. Yet, with so much money to be made so quickly, (in a recent survey, over 12% of gambling sites enjoy profits of over $50,000 each month) it's not surprising that many will take the chance. While banned or blacklisted pages can be fatal to a major corporation with valuable brand assets, it's no problem to those who will simply buy new (or old) domains to replace them and can reinvent themselves in moments. That's assuming they're caught, of course and plenty of sites can afford a full time team of programmers to keep them one step ahead of the search engine police.
As a result, there's a clear divide in the online gambling sector. On the one hand are those who want to get to the top of the search engines at any price. On the other is a new generation of leisure and entertainment sites who have invested in their brands and have long term business plans. While stealth optimisation is fair play for the former, abiding by the search engines' rules is the only option for the latter. There are three main forms of ethical optimisation:
Pay-per-click optimisation offers guaranteed results, is very quick to implement and doesn't require any site changes. But because positions are awarded to the highest bidder, it can be very expensive in such a competitive industry as gambling and requires constant bid management to optimise both positions and costs.
Trusted Feed optimisation, in which site data is fed straight into the search engine's index by an approved SEO company like Weboptimiser, may not require any site changes and often offers a lower cost per click than competitive bidding systems. The cost is fixed, making it a popular choice in the gambling sector. However, because Trusted Feed is better for targeting longer, more unusual search terms, extensive search term analysis is essential to maximise results.
Site and server-side optimisation, which involves making the home site more search engine-friendly, or creating a network of keyword-specific micro-sites linked to the home site is an effective long term strategy and has the added benefit of enhancing functionality as well as visibility. A link-building strategy is another form of site-optimisation that can boost rankings in some search engines, including Google. However, as sites need to be individually optimised for each search engine, it's really only suitable for big brands with large budgets. Moreover, results can't be guaranteed and can take several months to appear.
In short, the only way to optimise sites for the search engines long term is to do things their way: to design, format, structure, register, submit and host each site according to each search engine's individual, ever-changing (and often idiosyncratic) criteria, standards and processes. There are no short cuts.
David White
CEO
Weboptimiser Ltd
