More Online Casinos

It was once thought that the age of the “casino portal”, a website created for the purposes of referring players by affiliate links, was dying away. With the advent of the latest search engine algorithms, which attempt grade sites by their “usefulness”, many of the affiliate powered casino portal sites began to disappear. Additionally, the upper echelons of search rankings began to increasingly belong to actual casino websites themselves, cutting out the affiliate middleman who previously could lay claim to a percentage of a casino’s net win.

One shouldn’t forget, however, the ability of casino affiliates to adapt, or go extinct. Unlike actual casino websites, affiliates have the unique advantage of being able to open new sites and brand them relatively quickly, use alternate SEO methods, and re-incorporate content from previous websites. This luxury is not possible for casino websites, which would experience a huge loss in traffic if they suddenly changed their domain name or marketing methods.

The result is a new breed of super-casino portals. We were recently browsing the web the other day, and happened upon one such site JaxCasinos.com. At first glance, this site gives the impression of being an innocuous affiliate portal. When digging a little deeper, however, we noticed some important intricacies that make this website stand apart.

• Real Content – Jaxcasinos.com is not a banner farm website. A couple years ago, it was possible for many portal style websites to achieve high search engine rankings with little more than a couple paragraphs of text and two or three banners. More recently, these types of sites have been slowly nixed from the search engines, giving way to sites that are more focused on content and user experience. At Jaxcasinos.com, we found fairly well written casino reviews, and some good advice about casino games.
• Good Selection of Casinos – Whether you’re from the USA, Europe, or beyond, Jaxcasinos.com has a casino site for you. There are more than 25 different reviews and casinos featured, along with a great chart of deposit options for both USA and European players. This information is very helpful for those who actually want to play at an online casino, and not be turned away at the last minute because of credit card refusals.
• Trustworthy Brands – Most of the sites reviewed Jaxcasinos.com were trustworthy, and generally sought after by most online gamblers. It’s worth stating that today’s search engine algorithms do take into account levels of brand exposure, popularity, and how favorable other websites feel about a particular brand/casino. As a result, websites that carry favorable brands will generally get favorable search engine positions.

Overall, we’re impressed with the work done by the team at JaxCasinos.com. It will take time before this site takes any kind of ranking in the search engines, but we’re confident that the effort they’ve made producing quality content and tip-top reviews will pay off.

Good Luck!

As Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and other major brick and mortar casino resort cities suffer, it’s actually reported that online casinos are experiencing a slight growth.

According to a Reuters news report, released around March 12, 2009, European online casino operations should see a 10% growth in revenues, as interest in online gambling continues to grow.

This is due in part to the EU’s more open stance on online casino gambling, opposed to the USA, which currently forbids banks from processing any online gambling related transactions. There are a few basic reasons for this interesting trend.

One, it’s clear that while people have money to gamble, they don’t have money to travel and stay in a hotel for a week. Lodging, food, and airfare are all considerable expenses when one considers a trip to Las Vegas, so it makes sense that many casino fans simply drop them out of the equation altogether and just play online at home. Clearly, playing online casino games from one’s laptop is much more cost effective than planning an extensive stay in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Reno, or Atlantic City.

Second, while the USA is clearly crippled by the recent economic woes, a few European nations with concrete economies are maintaining the status quo; neither suffering from the recession, nor improving. As a result, citizens of these more affluent nations have money for leisure activities, unlike their American counterparts. Many online casino industry heavy-weights, like Microgaming Software, have dropped the USA market entirely and moved on to the European Union, Canada, Australia, and beyond.

Finally, payment solutions for European casinos are widely available and reliable. Many top European bookmakers and casinos have extensive cashier systems that are plugged right into major banks and payment systems. For example, Solo, Switch, and Maestro are all welcomed by casinos. In the USA, however, if one purchases casino chips, many times the transaction goes through what is known as an “uncoded” processor, a company that disguises the true reason for the purchase with a less conspicuous company or transaction title.

Eventually, as the economy returns to normal, business from the USA should grow again. In the meantime, online gaming companies that were wise enough to diversify their marketing into Europe and other non-USA jurisdictions should see things continue as normal, or even improve.