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Again, to echo what you said earlier, I agreed with, and Dom resaid one more time – We are throwing to many thing under the terms “white hat” and “black hat” which are really just differences of opinion on how far you should go to optimize for the SEs….
I think the people upset in this thread are all talking about copyright infringement and programs designed to optimized the stolen content and not SEO techniques.
Bernie
Ok, if that’s the case then lets stop calling it black hat seo and call it what it is – copyright theft.
Whether they use the copied content for SEO purposes or not is irrelevant, so lets stop bringing SEO into the equation.
It’s illegal copyright theft regardless of it’s ultimate purpose.
Croupier,
Great Post!
I think to some extent we are on the same side where this subject is concerned. My beef is with sites that scrape, steal content and more importantly mislead to receive and benefit from short term success in the search engines. I believe this is of importance to you and I and the industry as a whole.
Another site – this time classic cloaking and a good example of what some of the more prolific black hat affiliates are doing.
xhttp://www.wisewomanguide.com/blackjack-online.html
This page ranks currently #8 in google for Casino Online – I doubt google will have it in it’s index for much longer though.
Performing a whois lookup xhttp://www.wisewomanguide.com was pending renewal/deletion on the 9th June. The domain also has over 13,000 inbound links according to MSN.
On the 13th June it was registered by the new affiliate and due to it’s age in the index under it’s old proper guise and the cloaking applied to it, it now ranks very highly for a multitude of terms in google.
So croupier, would you say this technique is acceptable? Does this site offer any value to the serps and the people that use search engines? More importantly does this bother anyone here, that someone putting in a couple of hours work can get a landing page for party poker to appear prominently in the serps?
I will go back to my main point in my first post. Should affiliate programs vet websites before allowing them to promote their casinos and poker rooms?
As Simmo has stated the likes of William Hill and Ladbrokes vet sites before allowing them to join their affiliate program. So should we as members of CAP, be supporting this idea that the affiliate programs help us ensure the industry is not full of spammy doorway pages, cloaked pages, scraper pages and stolen content that offer nothing back to the industry?
This can easily be achievable if the programs concerned regulate who is allowed to promote them.
I am guessing that those that work on sites like wisewomanguide.com are very likely involved in creating scraper sites as well.
I’m not sure how you come to the conclusion that this site is using cloaking, it just looks like a crappy page to me.
As for the page/site, there’s no value in it at all but if you want to always get quality sites then you’ll need to go to a hand moderated directory.
There’s no way a spider can judge the quality of a site and I don’t think judging a sites quality is something we should be doing. If I was a judge there’d be a lot of webmasters who think they have good sites get put out of buisiness lol
There is no regulation in this industry. Yes, Britain is way ahead of the rest of the world in this. But the vast majority of countries has not regulated this industry, and if you ask me, much to its detriment.
I see some of the Black Hat SEO techniques like people putting up huge billboards every 100 feet all over the countryside.
It ruins every respectability, it is unfair competition, some of it is theft and most of all, it makes searching for something impossible.
I went to look for some lottery software to buy or lease. I spent literally hours wading through Golden Palace mirrors. Occasionally a Casino on Net broke into the monotony, or a few sites by Casino Partner casinos. The state lotteries, very important to our political survival in the US, were buried.
It is a mess and a shame and sitting back and saying it’s the engine’s job doesn’t clean it up. The gambling industry is about the last thing the engines worry about. We need to self regulate. We need to stop rewarding the criminal element in this industry. From fraudulent rake back affiliates to design and content theft to breach of contract – this industry has hit an all time low.
Dom makes a good point when she says “The gambling industry is about the last thing the engines worry about. “
They obviously dont review any of the gambling related terms, and their lack of attention to what/how they list, almost encourages techniques that most consider ‘black’. Right now, its extremely difficult to get listed for most keywords/phrases WITHOUT resorting in kind.
The Engines are making enormous amounts of income for these people, and the programs that are benefiting from those earnings, are turning a blind eye to it for the sake of short term profit….
I’m not sure what kind of lottery software you’re after but a simple search for
comes up with plenty of good relevant results and not a GP mirror in sight: We need to stop rewarding the criminal element in this industry. From fraudulent rake back affiliates to design and content theft to breach of contract
I think we’d all agree on this, but again you talk about black hat SEO when I think you’re really talking about copyright theft.
There’s nothing criminal about cloaking, keyword stuffing, buying links etc. It’s just a foolish short term game which will bite them in the arse. Build a quality site with lots of quality content and you’ll be fine.
Build a quality site with lots of quality content and you’ll be fine.
– and how about to be removed from SE’s after a few years of hard work?
The problem is in in all sort of SEs techniques, which affect other web sites. A passive position is not acceptable any more.
I agree that affiliate programs should take an active role in combating copyright theft, content scraping and page hijacking. If your SEO scheme is based upon damaging the hard work of others then this is clearly unacceptable and often criminal behavior.
CAP encourages all its partners to ensure that their programs are not rewarding this sort of illegal behavior by a few bad affiliates.
That being said I would like to clarify that CAP doesnt take a position on other forms of SEO and believe those are up to the individual affiliate marketer.
It’s really no one’s business how you choose to set up or optimize your sites as long as you are not stealing others content or attempting to gain raking by negatively impacting others.
I think linking, keyword weighting and stuffing, page design, doorway pages and even “white hat” cloaking are at the discretion of the webmaster and should not be a basis for any action by the programs. In other words if you acheive high rankings without abusing other peoples websites or efforts then more power to you.
My two cents
I will go back to my main point in my first post. Should affiliate programs vet websites before allowing them to promote their casinos and poker rooms?
Keep in mind…many of the casinos themselves have websites out there now, and use so called “black-hat” techniques too.
Vetting sites only assures that one of a webmasters sites is up to standard, he could have dozens of others redirecting to the casino via the vetted site and unless the casino personaly spots one of the other sites then it’s pointless.
If an aff prog actively pursues quality control after the initial vetting (ie. they follow up an any complaints about a non-vetted site) then it would work to a certain degree – but just initial vetting is pointless.
But lets face it, even those affs who obey all the rules could get rejected – many of the so called good sites are simply banner farms with a pretty face lift and offer no real original content.
Professor wrote:I agree that affiliate programs should take an active role in combating copyright theft, content scraping and page hijacking. If your SEO scheme is based upon damaging the hard work of others then this is clearly unacceptable and often criminal behavior.Thank you for that. Those are the black hat techniques we are talking about here.
I don’t know how keyword spamming and assorted stupid little tricks that don’t hurt anyone but the site that is doing it themselves keep getting into this thread.
Can we just all agree that it has nothing to do with anything and concentrate on doing something about the problems above?
croupier wrote:Vetting sites only assures that one of a webmasters sites is up to standard, he could have dozens of others redirecting to the casino via the vetted site and unless the casino personaly spots one of the other sites then it’s pointless.If an aff prog actively pursues quality control after the initial vetting (ie. they follow up an any complaints about a non-vetted site) then it would work to a certain degree – but just initial vetting is pointless.
But lets face it, even those affs who obey all the rules could get rejected – many of the so called good sites are simply banner farms with a pretty face lift and offer no real original content.
Hmmm. Well I know of programs that actually do vet any new sites added to your portfolio within a program before allowing you to generate creatives for them.
Yes it generates more work. But on this board people are complaining about scraper sites, copyright infringement, search engine spamming ( Yes this is an underhand technique and does get you banned from the search engines after a short period of time ), generating banner farms and landing pages to turn up high in the search engines as a result.
With the problems the casino industry is facing in the US in particular as well as other territories, wouldn’t it be good for all of us if we could help regulate the industry and improve it’s overall standing in areas where gambling online is frowned upon.
Or do we take the option of, we can’t beat them, so we will join them attitude?
Yes, but you don’t have to add a new site. You simply create a new site and add banners to it that redirect through a previous vetted site, unless the aff prog see the new site they’ll just think the traffic is coming from the previously vetted site.
I don’t know how keyword spamming and assorted stupid little tricks that don’t hurt anyone but the site that is doing it themselves keep getting into this thread.
Because you keep talking about SEO when the act of copyright theft is nothing to do with SEO it’s simply theft. The fact that they use the stolen content to improve their serps is irrelevant. If someone steals my car I don’t care where they drive it my only concern is that it’s been stolen.
