I’ve seen many posts around forums claiming that it’s impossible to be a successful poker affiliate. When looking at their site, it’s easy to see why: 1-3 page sites that have no keyword or content strategy and are just a pile of affiliate links. To succeed in this environment, you have to have a strategy. Once we go through the steps, you’ll realize just how open the poker environment is!

Here are the different questions you need to ask before devising a content strategy:

1. What are we offering?
2. Who would want this?
3. What are they searching for and interested in?
4. Why would they come to your site?
5. Why would they take your offer?

First, you have to think about what you’re offering and who would want those things. Let’s start with rakeback offers, but this process could also be done with free bankrolls, sign-up bonuses, deposit bonuses, free poker coaching offers, etc. Each type of promotion will have different features, and may appeal to wildly different groups of people.


What are we offering?

a. Rakeback

Rakeback implies continued participation with a site, which also means the player signing up has to be or think they are at least a break-even player. Rakeback is also a complicated idea that’s different from site to site and often depends on other promotions, and many times not fully explained.

Who would want this?

a. Winning or break-even players (or people who think they are either)

Winning and break-even players obviously want rakeback as it gives the largest returns for continued play, but these people typically only need one or two rakeback deals at their top sites. It’s a small group that really won’t reconvert, but people focus on this group the most! Let’s instead focus on the people who don’t really know what rakeback is: it’s a much larger demographic, and it’s very possible that these people will be interested in other offers when they bust or move sites, allowing you to double-dip by re-converting the same traffic again!

What are they searching for and interested in?

a. To the keyword tool!

Let’s see what comes up for “rakeback”:



This snippet of the results is very indicative of what I was saying: these searches imply knowledgeable users who know exactly what they are looking for. Also, “poker room name rakeback” terms are very competitive. Cue the doomsayers: “SEE? It’s impossible!” But we have another type of user in our demographic: the player that doesn’t really know what rakeback is. You can start by trying “what is rakeback”, but let’s try a more creative approach: ”can you make money online poker”. This searcher probably wouldn’t know what rakeback was, is probably new to online poker, and thus doesn’t have a rakeback deal yet. Keyword research takes a bit of creativity and experience, so don’t get down on yourself if you can’t find a good idea in a few tries (I’ve been doing this for a while!).



Bingo! We’ve found traffic around people who aren’t certain it’s possible or who want to make money online playing poker. Moreover, look at the sites in these search results. They aren’t big name sites, don’t have good PageRank or Alexa rank (which is an overly simplistic way of saying they probably aren’t very competitive). These types of search terms are one good area that we’ve found, and I can tell you there are many others.

Why would they come to your site?

a. To find out how to make money at online poker

Here’s where the content comes into play and most people drop the ball. It’ll take more work than simply throwing up affiliate links and calling it a day. Become an authoritative source on the topic. In this case we want to be an authority on “making money at poker online”. This means that you have examples of players who have become successful (and how they did it), tips and advice on how to replicate that success, resources (even off your site!) to help the user, tools like odds calculators, links to books/blog/twitter/facebook accounts of professionals, etc. Offer your unique take on players and situations: there’s never only one side of the story, even in science. Compile a feed of the best current poker tweets/freerolls/news. Once we had a direction (giving people ways to make money at online poker), coming up with content ideas for your site is super easy. The content ideas listed above will easily give enough content for the lifetime of your site.

Notice that I didn’t include hardcore strategy ideas for players: that’s probably not included in this demographic. People interested in that kind of thing probably already have rakeback deals. Just letting them know what’s possible and general guidelines to success is better than getting into the nitty-gritty strategy for this segment.

Why would they take your offer?

a. Because you’ve made yourself an authority on the subject

By giving the user descriptions and links to the tools, you’ve guided them down a path. In that path, simply place descriptions of rakeback offers (with affiliate links!) and how this helps them make money online. Don’t force-feed them only affiliate links, and don’t be afraid to link off-site. If you’ve created good rapport with the user, they’ll come right back.

It took 30 minutes for me to go through that thought process and find an unexploited niche in the poker affiliate space. 30 minutes! This is after poker affiliates have been flooding the internet with new sites for half a decade! With all of the other types of promotions and demographics out there, I’m sure you can find a spot where you can become successful as well.

Search engines are all about giving the searcher what they are looking for: if Google didn’t deliver superior results over Yahoo/InfoSeek/Lycos/etc, they wouldn’t have succeeded. Over the years, Google has changed and evolved their view on what constitutes “relevant” results. Currently, their position is that they want the site to add to the process of that users’ experience.

How does this apply to affiliates and outbound links? Well, here Matt Cutts says to limit the number of links on a page to under 100. Originally, this was because of technical limitations of Google themselves, but has evolved into a matter of user design: too many links is considered “spammy”. How many links can the average user really expect to visit, anyway? Furthermore, it looks very unnatural when your site has the vast majority of outgoing links pointing to one other site. If Google can see that your links are pointing to very few places and all are affiliate links, there’s also a chance you can get penalized as well.

So how do we fix this? Honesty is the best policy!

Here Google’s Matt Cutts describes his view of paid links (namely, that affiliate links are paid links). Google’s own suggestion regarding paid links is:

• Add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the a tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

The first option is pretty straightforward, but what does the second option mean?

Here’s what an affiliate link looks like for one of PAS’s properties, YourPokerCash, a site for free bankrolls:

• Free Bankroll - YourPokerCash.com

We want to change it to look like this instead:

• http://www.MyPokerSite.com/go/ypc.php

If you have Wordpress, here is an add-on called Simple URLs that makes this process a piece of cake.

There are multiple other ways to do this same action, but let’s just focus on something quick and easy that will work for the vast majority of sites and takes less than 5 minutes to set up:

1. Create a PHP file named “out.php” on your site in a directory called “go”.

a. So to get to this file, you’d type: http://www.MyPokerSite.com/go/out.php
b. The directory and file can be named whatever you want.
c. In the PHP file, put the following code (change the link to be your affiliate link):

2. Modify (or create if it isn’t there!) robots.txt in the root directory, and add the following to it:

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/

3. Check to make sure it’s set up:

a. http://www.MyPokerSite.com/robots.txt should give you something like this.
b. http://www.MyPokerSite.com/go/out.php should redirect to your affiliate link.

4. If you need more redirects, just make more of these files with different URLs in them and unique names.

To recap:

Keep the links on the page at a reasonable number, for both a usability perspective and to avoid punishment from the ranking algorithm. Does PokerStars really need to be linked every time it appears?

Avoid Google penalization by hiding your affiliate links from the spiders, or at least tagging them with “nofollow”. This is not only accepted by Google, but actively encouraged by them, so it’s best to follow this procedure.

Editors Note: JohnG has joined the team at PAS to add SEO insights to the PAS blog and to help you improve SEO effectiveness for your online poker affiliate sites.


Let’s tackle a topic that’s a common slip-up for many poker affiliate websites: simple brand names and common poker terms. By mis-naming a poker room or using a rare colloquialism (slang), you immediately eliminate your site from competition even though you could have done everything else right.

“What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;”

-Romeo and Juliet

Bill Shakespeare obviously didn’t have to deal with search engines, or he would know how important proper names really are.

1) Use proper and precise branded names.

Here’s an extreme example: Google searches for “party” vs “party poker”. One is a common noun while the other is obviously a brand. With many room names like “Mansion Poker” or “Fortune Poker”, it’s very important to include the word “poker” when you refer to the room. The reason for this is to gain relevancy for the correct term: don’t leave it to the search engines to try and guess what you mean when you say “party”.

2) Use correct spacing for the brands and terms

Going after misspellings can be fine, but you’re missing out on a lot of traffic. Using Google’s Keyword Tool, we can see the difference between “rakeback” and “rake back”. (The correct term is without a space: “rakeback”)




What does this all mean? The terms without quotes are “broad match” terms, while the terms with quotes are “phrase match”. Here’s an explanation of different match types. Broad match means this query will trigger results for any ordering of the query and even pieces of the query. For example, broad matching for “rake back” will trigger results for “rake”, “back”, “rake back”, and “back rake”. Notice how three out of four of those we definitely don’t want! Phrase matching means the words have to be spelled that precise way, in that order, and all words have to be present, but could contain surrounding words. For example, “rake back” in phrase match would trigger “get rake back” and “rake back deals”. (By the way, a back rake exists!) So we can see that a simple misspelling can bring up highly irrelevant results.

How do you know the correct spelling for terms like “rakeback”? Do the search and see what comes up, and take note of the volume in the keyword tool as well as the keywords that Google suggests. These will point you in the right direction. If you get the “did you mean…” message, that’s a pretty good indication that Google wants you to use the other variation on the spelling/spacing.

Here’s a screenshot of finding out searchers refer to “sit and go” tournaments:




According to the keyword tool, it looks like there’s the most volume for the term spelled as “sit and go”, so be sure to use that terminology on your site instead of “sng” or “sit n gos”.

3) Use the full brand name, or attach “poker” to your keyword

Many poker sites also have casino and sports-betting operations attached to them as well, like Bodog. So when someone searches for “bodog deposit bonus”, a lot of casino sites and offers come up. Not only does that mean you have to compete with many more sites for that keyword, but even if you end up ranking you’ll collect traffic that won’t convert because they would be specifically interested in the casino portion of the site. “bodog poker deposit bonus” Notice how we chopped out 400K sites worth of competition, while getting more relevant to the search and increasing our possibility for conversion!

While this is only the tip of iceberg when it comes to keyword research, it’s a good place to start. You might think you’re being cool by spelling it “T!tan Poker”, but you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.