With an impressive profit rise of 10% in 2011, Nordic-facing operator Unibet knows what it’s doing, especially when it comes to SEO. The company’s Head of Search, Nick Garner, joined our smokin’ hot reporter Dana Workman to pass on all he knows about Google Panda, along with some crucial advice for affiliates.
For those of us less technically inclined, Garner put the intricate ins-and-outs of Panda into simple terms – stating that it is essentially a search engine algorithm update, which was rolled out across the internet after an analysis by Google that reviewed thousands of websites with duplicate content. The update removed the sites Google considered to be spammy – basically those where all the content was the same.
“The sites that got hit were the sites which produced lots of content which was essentially the same as the other pieces of content on that site,” Garner explains. “This affected odds aggregators – there were a few that got away – but these sites are the sites which take betting odds for various operators and put them all in one place so the bettor can decide which sites they want to bet on; who has the best odds.”
Garner believes there’s only one thing for such sites to do. “Just start afresh,” he advised. “There’s no way back.” Saying it how it is, he warned that operators will have to start from the beginning, with a new domain, or change their business model to succeed.
Liking the buying of links to that of a class C drug, Garner cautioned operators that though it helps your rankings in the first instance and it gets you dependant, “over time links get worse and it all goes wrong,” he explained. “Google, i.e the government, is looking over you telling you ‘If you buy links you’re gonna [sic] go to prison’ and get knocked out of the search. That’s the end of it.”
Garner left us with some juicy tips for any operators looking to rule the search-engine roost. “You’ve got to get the architecture right. If you get the architecture wrong you’ve got a big problem,” he said, while assuring it is crucial for any operator to structure the campaign properly with adwords.
“Once you start churning the money through it – if you’ve got the architecture of the campaign wrong and you change everything around – your quality score goes through the floor. You’d pay a whole lot more money per click, and in effect you get taxation for change.”
Unibet’s king of search made it clear that reorganising your campaign six months down the line will only lead to even bigger problems, and could mean you’d end up spending 30% extra on adwords simply because you’ve got to build you quality score up again.
Garner’s Number one piece of advice: get the foundations of your adwords right first time in your campaign and you’re laughing.
