'Online Poker' Googlebomb

Philipp Lenssen writes "The blogger community is fighting back, though in ways not everyone may like: they are Googlebombing the Wikipedia page on online poker for the phrase "online poker" to make it rank higher in search engines. "Online poker", along with "Viagra", "mortgage" and "debt", are keywords heavily represented in comment spam, which itself aims to boost the Google ranking for a particular site and phrase. The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google."

Comments

Re:You submitted this...

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Wikipedia online poker page:

Online poker is the game of poker played over the Internet (online). It has been responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of poker players world wide, and as of December 2003, revenues from online poker were estimated at US$34 million per month.
Contents [showhide]
1 History
2 Legality
3 References
4 Most Popular Online Poker Cardrooms (external links)
5 External Links (oops! Missed these out somehow!)
[edit]

History

Traditional (or "bricks and mortar", B&M) venues for playing poker, such as casinos and poker rooms, are intimidating for novice players and are located in geographically disparate locations. Brick and mortar casinos are also reticent to promote poker because it is very difficult for them to profit from the activity. Though the rake, or time charge, of traditional casinos is often very high, the economic costs of running a poker room are also very high. Brick and mortar casinos often make much more money by removing poker rooms and adding more slot machines.

Online venues, by contrast, are dramatically cheaper due to the online venue having much cheaper maintenance costs. For example, adding another table does not take up valuable space like it would for a brick and mortar casino. Online poker rooms tend to be viewed as more player-friendly. For example, the software may prompt the player when it is his or her turn to act. Online poker rooms also allow the players to play for very low stakes, attracting beginners.

Online venues may be more vulnerable to certain types of fraud, especially collusion between players. However, they also have collusion detection abilities that do not exist in brick and mortar casinos. For example, online poker room security employees can look at the "hand history" of the cards previously played by any player on the site, making patterns of behavior easier to detect than in a casino where colluding players can simply fold their hands without anyone ever knowing the strength of their holding.

The major online poker sites offer varying features to entice new players. One common feature is to offer tournaments by which the winners gain entry to real-life poker tournaments. It was through one such tournament that Chris Moneymaker won his entry to the 2003 World Series of Poker. He went on to win the main event causing shock in the poker world. The 2004 World Series featured triple the number of players over the 2003 turnout. Like Moneymaker, 2004 winner Greg "Fossilman" Raymer also won his entry at the Poker Stars online cardroom.

In December 2003 it was reported that online poker revenues stood at around $34m per month and were growing by 27% per month. At peak times over 40,000 people are playing for real money at the various cardrooms with a like number playing free games.
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Legality

Online poker is legal and regulated in many countries including the United Kingdom and several nations in and around the Caribbean Sea.

The United States Federal Appeals Courts has ruled that while the Federal Wire Act prohibits electronic transmission across state lines of information for sports betting, there is no law prohibiting gambling of any other kind [1] (http://www.playwinningpoker.com/guide6.html).

However, some states have specific laws against online gambling of any kind. Also, owning an online gaming operation without proper licensing would be illegal, and no states are currently granting online poker licenses.

The government of the island nation of Antigua, which licenses Internet gambling entities, made a complaint to the World Trade Organisation about the U.S. government's actions to impede online gaming. The Caribbean country has won a preliminary ruling but the U.S. is expected to appeal.

In April 2004 Google and Yahoo!, the internet's two largest search engines, announced that they were removing online gambling advertising from thei

What Can Google Do?

[Krankheit]

Is Google doing anything to stop Google bombing? Is there anything they can do? I'm hoping Google will improve their GoogleBot so that sites that Google bomb to get into the top ten ranking stop getting in the top ten ranking, unless they truely what the user wants to see (informative). Wikipedia is likely to be quite informative though, so IMO this particular Google bomb is justified.

I so do not get this.

[porcupine8]

Could someone please explain what they're trying to accomplish here? This makes no sense to me at all. In any way.

highly unethical

[j0nb0y]

I think this is online poker high unethical. online poker It's a dirty, underhanded online poker tactic when spammers use online poker it, and we shouldn't online poker stoop to their online poker level.