Google removes alleged £1m search engine 'penalty' on gambling site

[BingoT]

Google removes alleged £1m search engine 'penalty' on gambling site

Google, the internet giant, has lifted alleged search engine penalties on an online betting group that could be worth millions of pounds to the business.

Media Corp, for reasons chief executive Justin Drummond claims he has never fully understood, saw one of the firms in its portfolio, drop in 2007 from the top spot to around 100th when users searched for the term "gambling". Mr Drummond estimates that this cost the company about £1m-a-year in post-tax profit.
By Mark Leftly


The place I found it at

[Webzcas]

I am guessing this relates to gambling.com

[dendrite]

Yes, it is gambling.com, but also one of their other sites that was given a penalty at the same time. This is their official announcement to the stock market, which gives some idea as to the money the penalty lost them:

Media Corporation plc, a leading AIM quoted advertising network and Internet publishing group, is pleased to announce that the Google penalty on two of the Group's major websites was lifted on Friday 16th October 2009.

The effect of the Google penalty, which was imposed on www.gambling.com and www.creditcardexpert.co.uk in October 2007, considerably reduced the Group's ranking in Google's search results and so significantly reduced inbound visitor traffic from Google which, in turn, adversely impacted revenues on these websites. The removal of this penalty, which was imposed for unknown reasons, together with the re-launch of Gambling.com should result in a marked improvement in the revenue generated through these websites.

In the year ended September 2007, www.gambling.com generated a gross margin of GBP1,065,000 and, following the penalty, gross margin reduced by 62 per cent. to GBP410,000.

In addition, in the year ended September 2007, www.creditcardexpert.co.uk generated a gross margin of GBP165,000. In the year ended September 2008, this reduced to GBP73,000, representing a fall of 56 per cent.

The company has certainly had a rough time. Back in 2007 when they first got the penalty, the Directors told their investors they were in talks with google and the penalty would be lifted within two weeks!

Two long years later....

[lots0]

The whole thing smells to me.

Google won't discuss penalties with anyone... period.

And as google won't discuss penalties at all, so how does gambling.com know the exact date that the penalty was removed???

This is one of those stories I just have to call 'bull shit' on.

The google penalty may have been removed from gambling.com but it sure as hell was not because of any 'talks' the management was having with google... More like gambling.com complied with the google rules (stopped spamming the search engines) and submitted a re-inclusion request then sat out the penalty... just like any other site that google catches using blackhat SEO.

Maybe gambling.com's new SEO company will do a better job than the last company that got them banned.
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