Bodog Battles to Beat Lawsuit, Keep SERPs - Yet Another Move

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Not long after that, however, Bodog was moving again, this time to BodogLife.com. Doing a Google search on Bodog quickly turns up BodogLife.com at the top position. This is a very good thing for the company brand, since the major search engines will not allow gambling and casino ads. In short, Bodog can’t use a pay-per-click campaign to let users know about the site or the redirection, unlike many other businesses.

But it’s clear that Ayres intends this last move to be permanent. “Once we get Bodog.com back from Raymond Niro and the 1st Tech Patent Trolls,” he explains in a blog post, “we will just use it as a redirect since there will be no reason to change back again and by then the new site will be too well positioned in the search engines again to make it worth the effort to change.”

Even so, wasn’t it a struggle to make the two moves? “Making the transition from Bodog.com to Newbodog.com to BodogLife.com has not been the SEO nightmare that so many naysayers would like to think,” Ayres revealed. “Within 12 hours of having Bodog.com stolen we had moved everything over to a new URL and within five days we had all of our new domains resume their number-one positioning on Google.”

One is forced to ask, however: number one for which keywords? As of this writing, Bodog has not regained its strong position for generic keywords in the online gambling market. For the very same keywords for which it used to come up as the number one listing in Google, Bodog is not even among the top 30 results. That could be the kiss of death in an industry as highly competitive as online gambling.

On the other hand, the new domain name – BodogLife – hints at a possible change of focus at the company. Bodog, after all, is not a name that can inherently be associated only with gambling. Bodog introduced Bodog Girls in 2002 (with their own calendar following in 2005), and its site includes tabs labeled “bodognation,” “bodogmusic,” “bodogtv” and “bodogfight.” In short, Ayres seems to be trying to reposition Bodog from an online gambling site into a lifestyle brand. With a business that brings in $7.3 billion a year, Ayres could turn himself into the next Hugh Hefner.

Next: It’s Far From Over >>
 

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