That being said, affiliates need to be aware of a few changes in the affiliate program offered by MMGG.

The most important thing to note, of course, is the new name. Bovada (located at www.bovada.lv) is the new Bodog (formerly bodog.eu). All of your current US Bodog players will be moved automatically to the new site with all affiliate tags intact. Your existing commission plans remain in effect, with the only notable difference being that BettingPartners.com is now providing the reporting and statistical analysis for these players.

Because BettingPartners.com will also handle all the new US traffic coming to the site, you’ll need to get a new Bovada tracking link from your affiliate account. All the information you need, from new banners to new write-ups, will all be available with your BettingPartners.com account. In addition, your BettingPartners account will include unique marketing materials and specific Bovada bonus offers

As of right now, US players who click on a Bodog banner will be redirected to Bovada (with your tracking retained).

Keep in mind: Bodog itself is not dead. It is available for all non-US poker players and therefore should still be actively marketed by affiliates. The same exclusivity surrounds Bovada; Bovada is open only to US players and will not be accessible to players who live in other parts of the world.

Of course, this post is for information use only. All inquiries should be directed to your account manager or to Betting Partners customer support. However, if you have a reaction to this recent news, we’d love to hear it!

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This offer, unlike the lives of some creatures of night, won’t last forever, so take advantage while you can.

Affiliates will battle against each other, against their affiliate manager, and against the rest of the Bet365 affiliate team. Overall winner will get a choice of an iPad2 or a 50″ flat screen television, but just because you weren’t number one at the end doesn’t mean you can’t win a little something for yourself.

Throughout the season, prizes will be awarded for the “Manager of the Month” (a bottle of champagne and accolades!), the leader at Christmas time (an iPad2!), and a weekly prize drawing (signed t-shirts!).

To start registration, email your affiliate manager with your affiliate username and your creative fantasy team name. I say “creative” because there are over 50 affiliates already signed up, and there’s only one week left in the registration process. There’s no time like the present to start an excellent chain of bragging rights.

Good luck!

This doesn’t just affect players from the United States; Casino Coins will be rolling up the welcome mat (and all the welcome bonuses) for new casino players around the world. For current players of these casinos, it will be business (or rather, pleasure) as usual.

As shocking as this news is, it unfortunately comes as no surprise. We continue to see more fallout from the Department of Justice’s indictments against the online poker powerhouses, and speculation is that the DOJ is making it more and more difficult for casino operators to secure funds processing within America’s borders. While many of us feel this is the storm before the calm, when online gambling legislation is finally introduced in the US, it’s unclear how many online casinos have to fall before the affiliates can pick up the pieces of their lost revenue and disappearing customer base.

As one of the first initiatives since becoming an independent council, the eGAP revisions come at a time when the online gambling community has shown it needs a little guidance, as we’ve seen recently with Absolute Poker and Blanca Gaming of Antigua. As The news of eCOGRA’s latest updates wasn’t much of a surprise, especially since the CEN Workshop Agreement came out earlier this year.

Andrew Beveridge, eCOGRA CEO states, ”By aligning our eGAPs with these recommendations, which cover nine key areas of activity, we not only provide a relevant and current roadmap to our accredited sites, but offer an expert framework useful to other operators committed to meeting requirements that are largely common to most regulatory initiatives.”

Beveridge also noted in the eCOGRA press release that any operator who currently has a eCOGRA seal should comply with the latest developments in both eGAPs and CEN requirements. No word on whether or not an eCOGRA seal could or would be revoked if some gaming sites fail to comply, or what the grace period might be if that does end up being the case.

We’ve covered the CEN Workshop Measures in a previous post. Of the 9 subject areas and 134 detailed requirements, the revised eCOGRA statement now includes all of them. This is to ensure that wherever the eCOGRA seal is placed conforms to the strict European Union standards and individual regulations of most countries.

Google is putting more emphasis on what so many white-hat SEO gurus have been preaching for years: make a quality site, fill it with original, meaningful content, keep your end-user in focus, and use your code appropriately and  the search engines will find you. There are no quick fixes in Search Engine Land; building a web resource is a marathon.

Content thieves beware–Google is watching. If you’re going to use someone else’s content, don’t copy and paste. Use their resource as quotable material and strengthen your content with the additional link to their site.  Do the right thing: create your own content and link out to your source material. Google, your clients, your users, and even your competition, will respect you for it.

The only question is how much like Big Brother Google will end up being. How it determines quality will shape how we shop, learn, reach out, and connect with friends, businesses, and entertain ourselves with videos, movies, and online gaming.

In an article posted by CourierMail, which sites Daniel Tzvetkoff, a 28-year-old Australian “boy wonder”, as the first domino to start the cascade. Tzvetkoff allegedly shared his knowledge of how the casinos circumvent American banking to transfer and launder money back to offshore accounts. This information proved to be quite handy, as he was arrested and, until recently, held without bail, for the same charges (money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud) last April.

The CourierMail article goes on to suss out why federal prosecutors choose to follow the money rather than the actual access:

“The federal prosecutors believe that online gambling companies act illegally by offering US citizens seats at virtual gambling tables, but they have not taken the companies on in court. The companies, and powerful lobby groups, argue that online poker, roulette or blackjack are games of skill, not chance, so are not technically “gambling”. Rather than risk losing such a case, the prosecutors instead chase the proceeds of gambling, and prosecute related cases of bank fraud, illegal money transmission and money laundering.”

Business Insider also posted articles regarding the online poker scandal and the “Boy Wonder” and his table-turning backlash.

Online player forums blew up with the news. Casino Affiliate Programs started posting the news as more and more players lost access to their accounts (and their available balances). The Games and Casino Poker Forum has line after line of online poker players expressing concern, both for their active accounts and the industry as a whole.

For the rest of us, it’s a matter of seeing the big picture. Most affiliates see this recent waive of seizures as a sign of things to come. On one hand, if the US Federal Government takes down the big dogs who are funneling illegal money, they can bombard the current system with  a new one, using US companies, US regulation, and generate US taxes and income. On the other hand, if the intention was to remove online poker from the US completely, we’re in for more and more drama.

In the meantime, however, the estimated 30,000,000 US players who like to gamble online will likely find other ways and vices to use their extra cash–and you can bet it won’t be to help fund education, healthcare, highways, and sanitation salaries.

Barry Schwartz from Search Engine RoundTable ran a poll after Google Panda/Farmer was implemented asking how its users were impacted. “We had 313 responses to date, which isn’t a bad sampling size,” he noted at the time, adding, of course, that the owners of the websites most impacted were most likely to respond. Here are his initial results, as noted in his blog post:

• 40% said Less Google Traffic (Negative Impact)
• 25% said Same Google Traffic (No Impact)
• 18% said More Google Traffic (Positive Impact)
• 14% said Don’t Know Yet
• 1.6% said an Other answer

Mr. Schwartz goes on to tell you his advice on getting off the Google Panda “naughty list” in a subsequent article, “Google: Remove Low Quality Content if you were impacted by Panda/Farmer.”

Sixtrix published figures of the hardest hit sites, and SearchEngineLand published an easy to understand version. These are the ten hardest hit sites:

• WiseGeek.com: With a 77% drop and a 93.3622 index loss, WiseGeek.com, which offers “clear answers for common questions” was hit the hardest with the Google Panda/Farm transition.
• ezinearticles.com: Not surprisingly, this content mega-farm was also seeing sharp declines with an index loss of 58.4273 and a 90% drop in views.
• suite101.com: Another large content farm, Suite101 noted an index loss of 50.755, which is a whopping -94%.
• hubpages.com: In an effort to alleviate it’s initial dip of a 47.7632 index loss (a -87%), HubPages is amassing a huge anti-farm ad campaign geared toward improving its image. A positive sign: it has promised to pay its writers more for good content.
• yourdictionary.com: Duplicate content was likely the culprit for YourDictionary’s index loss of 39.5044, -74% drop.
• brothersoft.com: A surprising lack of content greets users to BrotherSoft.com, a website that allows free downloads of software. Perhaps this is a factor in its index loss of 66% (37.6418 points).
• buzzle.com: You’ll find hundreds of articles about pandas at Buzzle.com, but nothing regarding their recent index loss of 36.7005 (that’s -85%) from Google’s algorithm.
• associatedcontent.com: While some bloggers saw this as a target to a Google competitor (Associated Content is owned by Yahoo), nevertheless, this huge content warehouse lost a chunk of its index, a 35.7198 point loss at -93%
• freedownloadscenter.com: Much like BrotherSoft.com, FreeDownloadsCenter also lost a chunk of the action (27.2522 points, or -90%).
• essortment.com: Owned by Demand Media, Essortment.com claims to be “your source for knowledge”. It saw a index loss of 91% (23.4146 points).

As sites on and off this list negotiate the new Google algorithm, one thing is for sure: it may not be the quality of the content that is the issue, but rather how that content is used.

Personally, I am happy to see this update. Content thieves – who needs them? Good riddance I say! As far as the article marketing goes – I don’t see why thoughtless gibberish should rank as well as quality, researched, unique articles anyway. Why should some of us work hard while the rest coasts on what is mostly BS?

If people would put the time they spend coming up with ways to game Google towards creating quality – I think they would do a lot better anyway. (Ok, SEO guys, you can beat me up now )

Now that it’s been established that the new Google Panda is unsympathetic to article farms and content factories, what do you do if you have relied heavily on article marketing? While it appears a lot of the directories are pretty much worthless now, there are a few things you can do.

According to Google’s Help Desk Agent Wysz, in an article posted in the Google webmaster Help page, “If you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”

Google’s Help Desk Agent JohnMu gave very similar Google Panda advice, stating, “If you do have such high-quality, unique and compelling content, I’d recommend separating it from the auto-generated rest of the site, and making sure that the auto-generated part is blocked from crawling and indexing, so that search engines can focus on what makes your site unique and valuable to users world-wide.”

The days of creating cheap content for a link and some traffic are over. Auto-blogs, $3 articles and non-informative basic overviews of a broad topic are not going to help you anymore. To get links you will need to create high quality content with images, video, and niche websites that will display the content after serious editorial review.

Article marketing is not dead; quality articles on quality sites will still be beneficial. What is dead are articles that have no value to readers and sites that accept such articles. Consequently, links from these places are also useless.

Find out if the new Google Panda has hurt your website.

How to check if you were affected by Google Panda:

With the latest Google algorithm update sweeping through the Internet, websites are scrambling to re-optimize their content to ensure appropriate search rankings. To see if you were affected, Wordtracker suggests you follow these steps, which we’ve summarized from their Google Panda survival guide:

1. Go to your Google analytics dashboard.
2. Check the graph, but even if all looks well, go to the next steps to make sure.
3. Go to the Search Engines report in the Traffic Sources menu, and there you choose “non-paid”
4. Now click on “Google”
5. Click the “Keyword” column heading above the list of keywords
6. On the large sub menu, click “Country/Territory”
7. Now enter “United States”, or alternately, if the algo has been rolled out in the UK by the time you see this, “United Kingdom” into the filter
8. Find the 24th of February on the resulting graph.

Do you see a dip? Ouch! Wordtracker also has a series of suggested steps to help you get out from under that Panda.  These are some of the ones most likely to help:

1. Find and isolate the pages and page types hit worst on your site as compared to the pages that fared better.
2. Make a list of your different page types (for instance, if you have forums, quality articles versus lower quality articles, light category versus quality category content, product information, blog posts, etc).
3. Put the list in a column in a spreadsheet and start building a content tracking table. It will be helpful to add columns for relevant factors like how many ads are present, how much content is available, any “dupe” (duplication) factor, etc. You will also find it useful to note the number of pages and % drop in Google US organic visits. The next step in your table construction, of course, is to fill in the values for each type of page.
4. Now take a look at your risk assessment. Says Wordtracker: “Look at how much of your site (% of pages) is taken up by your lowest quality pages and improve that.”
5. If you find that you have a lot of duplicate copy, which happens with some content management systems and on several ecommerce websites that include URL’s for “faceted pages”, make sure to add rel=canonical tags to the duplicated pages. This stops Google seeing those pages as duplicate content.
6. Of course, you’ll need to edit any “over-optimized” pages and improve anything that might make the user’s experience better.
7. An important note: Make sure to offer users more information when they first land on one of your pages (for example, provide images, videos, attractive text and pages linking to your best content).
8. Be nimble and quick. Making as many improvements as fast as you can may help shake off any Google penalty. Once your content improves, you can slowly add back any missing ads, marketing, etc to ensure you are making the most of your website with getting slapped by Google.

This, of course, only helps if some of your pages are affected, and others are fine. If you whole site tanked, you’ll just have to figure out what all the offensive parts are and replace them with quality content.

So which of the biggest websites was was most adversely affected by this? Read our next post: “Google Panda: The Biggest Losers”.

It all started with an announcement by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer in the Google Blog:

“…in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

As the repercussions of this change were felt around the Internet, we discovered a Wired.com interview with Google engineers, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal. Here we find these comments:

• Singhal: “So we did Caffeine [a major update that improved Google’s indexing process] in late 2009.  Our index grew so quickly, and we were just crawling at a much faster speed. When that happened, we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.”
• Matt Cutts: “It was like, ‘What’s the bare minimum that I can do that’s not spam?’  It sort of fell between our respective groups. And then we decided, okay, we’ve got to come together and figure out how to address this.”

What you didn’t hear a lot about from Google is that this update also goes after copied content. In January, prior to the update release, Matt Cutts made the comment that Google was “evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”

A few weeks later Panda/Farmer made it’s debut. So we can assume that it also targets duplicate content and copied content. This, of course, is something most webmasters welcome with open arms. Content thieves are a never-ending nuisance. We can only hope this new algo puts them out of business.

See our next post: “Google Panda: What To Do If You’ve Been Affected”