This is a guest contribution by Riaan de Jager.  If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

The stakes are high when it comes to the top results in organic Google search results. Competition for the top gambling keywords is fierce. Affiliates, operators and SEO agencies all jostle for position and those who work out how to push the boundaries without overstepping the mark will be richly rewarded.

So-called “white hat SEO’s” who are not familiar with industries like gambling will tell you to simply follow Google’s clear webmaster guidelines and you will prosper. They urge you to follow the coding guidelines, write great content so that people will link to your sites and bang! You’ll rank. This type of naïve advice can be extremely frustrating for webmasters who try to step into the more competitive SEO verticals, and you simply won’t get very far if you aren’t prepared to experiment.

I’m not for a minute advocating that you abandon all reason and go totally black hat in your SEO efforts, but a good dose of reality is not a bad idea when it comes to the gambling niche. Many top ranking sites appear to not be paying much attention to the written law of Google.