Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

Cracking Google’s ’secret sauce’ algorithm at ComputerWorld is a great article on SEO and the money involved in it. It seems that online gambling is a pretty big market. (I wonder if there’s any money in Viagra online? I’ll have to look into that. Mortgages? Less savory content?)

Can a poker Web site rank high on a Google search using purely white hat tactics — meaning no spamming, cloaking, link farms or other frowned-upon “black hat” practices. Fishkin answered yes, provided the site also 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 cutthroat online gambling sector.

But one poker Web site 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 $10 million,’” recalls Fishkin, president and CEO of SEOmoz in Seattle. Intrigued but skeptical, Fishkin consulted other gambling site owners at the conference. “They said, ‘If it really does rank there, we might be interested in paying you $10 million more.’”

Turns out, a single online gambling customer brings in at least $1,000 in revenue. With a recent Google search of “Texas Holdem Poker” yielding 1.64 million results, it’s easy to see why site owners would pay millions to crack the code for Google’s PageRank algorithm — the elusive Holy Grail of online marketing.