Mr Wordsmith

I havent heard of them.

BB1 I am always leary of properties or obscure search engines that I havent heard of. Think about it, as professional webmasters we spend all day online and cruise thru thousands of websites each week. If we havent heard of a site how many players do you think go there?

Honestly does anyone really believe “real people” use these little known search engines like Kanoodle or Search123 or MrWordless?

Ask anyone what they search with and they will tell you Yahoo, MSN, AOL or Google. 99.999% have never heard of these other search engines nor do they use them. Why would they? Do you think the returns at Kanoodle are more relevant then MSN? Do you make a bee line to Dogpile when searching for something online? Does your Mom use Momma.com? I think not. Real players dont either.

I know we all want to offset the traffic we lost at Overture and Google adwords, but turning to PPCs that no one really uses isnt the answer. I think we will all need to sharpen our SEO skills, purchase banner ads on recognized channels that will still let us, advertise offline and change the ways we have been marketing if we are going to survive in this new market place.

Well put, Professor.

Just as an aside, I’ve tried a couple of PPC engines targeting gambling traffic (bettorsearch.com, searchgambling.com, etc).

Worthless. Completely worthless.

Hi,

I agree Prof for the most part. Currently I am visiting smaller PPCs that I received traffic from thru places like Findwhat and goclick. I think wordsmith sent traffic to me thru goclick.

I think there is a percentage of real players that use the smaller engines; of those times; I’d imagine it is a scenario where a site has added a smaller engine as an affiliate and yes, there are going to be people that will type in their search on the search box they find at the site they’re currently visiting, as opposed to visiting google or yahoo.

Now here is where I admit I’m stretching hope; but HOPEFULLY…. as searchers come to the realization that doing a search at google for online casino; is only going to get them results that are saturated with redirects, popups, and basically get them a return of results that are sub-par to the kind of casino or portal they would get thru a paid ad campaign.

I know a lot of people think that you can’t do better than the free results that one gets from google or yahoo, but it is my opinion that these results are sub-par when it comes to doing a search for anything that involves spending money.

Give me the paid advertisers every time in that instance because they’re much, much more likely to be concerned with keeping their customers happy. I know because I am. If I didn’t pay for traffic I’d be much more casual about the casinos I list because I could afford to be; okay, that’s not true because its my nature to treat people how I would want to be treated, but you see my point.

Even those that aren’t bound by their ethics ARE bound by simple economics. Send your traffic to a casino that is slow or no-pay; and 95% will not be back. If you are paying prime prices for traffic; you’ll not be around this time next year if you are sending your players to some place they get jerked around.

As has the net has always proven (to me anyway) that regardless of how you wrap it; if its shit then people are going to smell it and avoid it. It might take a while, but they will catch on and in the end; those that played respectably will be the only ones left standing.

I think that’s true in this matter as well. In time; (unlesss google turns it around), people are going to start searching for their casinos someplace that returns results that are more than the half dozen redirects to starluck casino, a listing for Windows casino, and a handful of other …. usually sub-par portals and casinos – that one gets from google now when doing a search.

Note- I know the above is an exaggeration, but it reads so much better than “a bunch of crappy results” ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

BUTTTTTT…… even if my perspective comes true; it still doesn’t take away from the fact that you are going to get the best traffic doing SEO. no arguement there.

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Lou. Good to see you could join us. ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

bet you missed my smart ass huh?

….. I couldn’t resist. ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

I’ve heard of MrWordSmith (there’s a surprise, huh, BB1). They used to have a sh*tload (technical term) of pages appearing high up in Google, but I haven’t seen them in the SERPs recently. I’ve never used them though and unless they rank well for some of your targeted terms in other search engines, I really wouldn’t bother.

So, here’s another PPC tip that people will tell me to shut about : take the list of the search terms you want to target in the PPCs, run a search for these terms at Google and Yahoo and see which small-time PPCs are ranking in the top twenty for each specific term. Then it’s just a matter of buying placement for each term on the PPCs that are ranking top twenty in Google and Yahoo.

Once again, don’t bother with the top 4-5 or you’ll reduce your ROI (there’ll still be lots of dodgy clicks) but you should be able to turn a profit even with the dodgiest PPC this way.

Thanks T! That’s a little nugget of Gold if I’ve ever heard one.

Cheers!

I tried mrwordsmith – they suck