$10m to get a top 5 position in Google for Poker
I loved this article over at PC Advisor where well known SEO Fella Rand Fiskin from search engine optimisation company, SEOmoz talks about his trip to London for the recent Search Engine Strategies conference.
Anyway, the juicy part of the story is that at the conference Rand was asked the following:
‘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 story continues…
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.”
Anyway, that’s the general idea of the story, but do go and read it for yourself. So…$10m just to get a poker site in the top 5. Nice work if you can get it. But achievable? I don’t see why not. I mean I know this sector is just about the most competitive in the world but a with a lot of hard work and some really clever people on the team then I’m sure it could be done. After all, my little old poker site is currently number 39 in Google for the term “poker“. Ok number 39 isn’t that great unless you count the fact that the domain has been dormant for about 2 years and that I’ve only just rebuilt it the other week (its still not finished) and that I have done zero SEO work on it.
So maybe, just maybe I should go for a top 5 spot and the $10m pot? 
EDIT: If the term “online poker” is the hot term to use then maybe its about time to get my www.pokeronline.co.uk domain out of storage? I bought it a couple of years ago as I knew it was a very popular poker term but never did anything with it.
What I’m listening to right now: Ne-Yo - “Because of You”
Affiliate Marketing - Rand Fishkin - poker
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
May 9th, 2007 at 7:54 am
You have half the tools to do this, some very good domains that you have owned for a good few years with relevant search terms in the title.
This whole poker market looks pretty scary though - but if you could team up with some top SEO companies, the type who get companies to the top of ultra competitive markets such as web hosting, loans etc you could be on to a winner.
Another plate to spin, but I’m sure it would be worth your time by what you learnt about SEO along the way.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Hows about this then for an idea to help you get that top 5 listing? First of all make-sure everyone is ready to pay up because this is going to cost you some money down the line, but is totally ethical and completely what’s going on in a lot of circles these days with link-baiting practices.
Firstly, get the site all nice and presentable so it doesn’t look like a piece of crap. Maybe develop some silly little flash movie about poker players or some thing on there - there has to be a pay-off that isn’t necessarily full on poker.
Secondly - set up the ‘3 Million Dollar Google-Bomb Link Challenge’. Basically, it’s a spin on the old SEO competition, but open for everyone who owns a blog, myspace page, forum, web 2.0 profile page or whatever.
The idea is simple, they have to get you as many keyword specific links as possible (no comment spam or similar is acceptable) and the linker with the mosts gets a one million dollar prize. There’d have to be some way to tag each link, maybe a simple query string on the end or a CSS class to prove ownership.
Now this $1,000,000 is great as it is - imagine the buzz. However, that’s just a start - the next twenty top linkers each get a $100,000 dollars.
Set them loose and imagine the carnage - to the best of my knowledge no one has done something with such big prizes in the past, and the trick is to get it outside the usual SEO lot, and into the Digg, MySpace, Stumble sort of arena. The buzz around it would be superb - and when you got there - a tidy 7 million profit is yours.
The only downside would be you Google bowled yourself out of the SERPs with the sheer speed of the volume you picked up. Either that or they did a hand edit as you’re effectively buying a top listing.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Lol, Dio sounds like a good idea until you get to the bit about Google kicking you out of the serps, which kind of defeats the purpose
May 9th, 2007 at 11:36 am
I’d take a lot of advice on that last bit because I’m not sure if they’d actually do it - as long as the competition and links were all squeaky clean and from authority sites, it would be churlish of them otherwise. It’s sort of an extension of the link baiting that Golden Palace have done over the years in a way - and I think they’re still up there.
May 9th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I used to work very heavily in the online poker industry, and this $10mil is completely justifiable.
The top affiliates were receiving just shy of $1.5mil p/month in affiliate commissions!
May 10th, 2007 at 7:47 am
PartyGaming purchased Empire Online a few months back for £30 that was basically just a set of affiliate sites. At one point Empire Online was worth of £500million with very little assets.
This industry has quietned down a bit since the US regulation but is still pretty massive.
Good luck, I am personally against promoting gambling having been addicted a couple of years back. But it would be a great SEO exercise.
May 12th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I bet Rand wont take up the challenge becuase its a lot easier to be a consultant and tell people how to do SEO rather than actually rank for a competitive term.
It does make me wonder about these so called SEO gurus. Surely is they are as good as they claim, they would be using their skills to be top on google for “poker” or “porn” and earning millions. Maybe its a case of “Those who can’t do it, teach.”
My advice to Rand is to go for it, £5 million is a lot better than SEOmoz’s turnover last year of only $600k and a profit of $64k.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seomozs-2006-financial-statements
May 14th, 2007 at 10:46 am
One way you won’t get poker.org.uk to the first page is by copying all of the tips and card hands exactly from Victor Chandler poker.
Poker.org.uk needs a lot of work before you will even come close. The domain excellent, but with pages full of duplicate content, I don’t think any amount of incoming links will get you there.
May 14th, 2007 at 10:48 am
anonymous - as I said in my post I haven’t done *any* SEO work on poker.org.uk. I’m fully aware of the duplicate content issue and I will address that when I start doing some SEO on the site.
May 18th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Well it looks like you are on your way up, position 32 now when I have just looked!
That $10m pot is gettign closer
Cheers
Wardy
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Ranking in google.co.uk isn’t the same as google.com.
Bit rich you attacking anyone who “copies” your sites if you have cut n pasted from Vic Chandler too. Pot and kettle.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Anonymous - yes I know google.co.uk isn’t the same as google.com. What’s your point?
And the content I “cut and paste” from Victor Chandler was done so with their permission. And I even credited them for it on my site. Big difference between that and someone totally ripping my sites off without my permission.
June 11th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Hi there
I am trying to optimise a number of sites aswell and struggling with search terms such as poker, online poker, its so competitive - competing with the poker operators who have all the money in the world and then with affiliates who have been in this game for ages and have enough money and resources to blow us smaller poker affiliates out the market. I am currently no where to be seen in google for those big search terms. http://www.pokeralerts.co.uk/
December 30th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
[...] still waiting for some clever person(s) to spot the potential of my poker site/domain and make me a great offer for [...]