Tips for a tough market: Gambling

[castano]

Yes, that's what I'm working on now. As you might already know / have guessed, gambling is not a really well regarded source of enterntainment amongst... well, amongst 90% of the world popppulitaion, yet there is a huge market for both online casinos and affiliate sites. I believe it to be the second biggest internet market after porn, so, yes, we live in a weird world.

Honest linkbuilding is almost impossible, there's really few people that would dare to post an entry on their reputated blog of the "check this out, my friend's new casino site" kind, neither placing on their site a nicely anchored back-link.

We also do CMS web-development, but, of course, not a single client has accepted to keep a link to our casino site in their footer.

We have tried some link-baiting technics with interesting content by sending it to news aggregators, but most of the feedback we get (after the users read our url) is of the: "gonna downvote the h*** out of you lousy spammer!" kind.

Our site doesn't look dodgy at all, we intended to get rid of the sordid look that most affiliate sites sport, and I think that we succeded. (Here it is, if you guys wanna take a look http://www.ilovecasino.es/ ).

So here we are, out in the cold, developing our own "satellite sites", working hard in the seo for all of our other sites, giving away free drupal templates that carry an uncloacked link to us in the footer... all the classics.

So, any nice feedback on how to get sweet white-hat links in such a complicated market will be strongly appreciated.

Hope you can pardon both my rather long question and pretty poor english

[StalkerB]

Ah, the wonderful world of gambling SEO

Unfortunately not going to give you all my secrets on here but I'll give you a few pointers (I'm nice that way).

Get more social. Brand signals and getting people to talk about you is a moderate indicator that you're not completely rogue.

Off the back of that I'd make some more, non-promo led content. Looking at your site (y mi español no es muy buena) all your content seems to be promo driven. Get some content up people want to share and link to.

As an affiliate, you really need to offer 'more' to your user base. Give them tools to track their play or have exclusive offers or set up something like a shop they can earn points for based on their play. Ultimately there are 1000 affiliate sites they could use why are they going to recommend yours (and by recommend I mean talk about and link to).

Gambling SEO requires a creativity based almost entirely on what you can do to get people talking as (as you've discovered) people consider all links you try and acquire or share yourself as spam. You need people's friends or other people they trust (influencers) to be talking about your site.

[Cashking]

Paying for traffic is the best way to get traffic for gambling websites today. The main problem is - it is very costly and you need to experiment with many different affiliate programs for a lot of reasons.

1. What might work for site A doesn´t necessarily work for site B.
2. Brands that were converting great last year perhaps wont work anymore.
3. Always try to think "out of the box". If you just do what other gambling affiliates are doing with success - they will always be a step ahead of you.
4. Go conferences and meet people - it is one of the best places to get links from the industry.

[KeriMorgret]

Have you read this YouMoz about white-hat link building in the gambling industry?

http://moz.com/blog/case-study-whitehat-link-building-in-the-gambling-industry

Edit: Just realized the original question is from 2011, so I don't imagine the OP had a time machine to see that post.