SEO Optimization Specialist

Link building and driving traffic to a website are the life-blood of any successful web endeavor. Unfortunately it can be quite difficult but one thing I have noticed is the large number of sites offering free online games.

Most folks, from your average computer user to your hard-core gamer are looking to kill a bit of time each day relaxing and having fun on the web. If you can get them to come to your site to play card games, racing games or something of the sort then they might just hang around and become a frequent visitor.

Around 2 years ago I noticed tons of arcade sites popping up daily. These were using a low cost script and seemed to be an interesting way to start your own little web business. Around 6 months later the market seemed to be saturated and I saw many of these same sites being sold on webmaster forums. The traffic statistics on these sites appeared to be quite impressive but one common problem I noticed was very low income vs. high traffic. This really stems from the fact that most players of these types of games don’t click on ads, much like webmasters don’t click ads on other webmaster related sites.

My conclusion is that you are better off adding an arcade section to an existing website than having a standalone arcade site because there is simply too much competition.

Google updates URL’s for adwords, here is the official announcement:

We’d like to give you advance notice of an update to our display URL policy, which will take effect on April 1st. While the majority of advertisers will not be affected at all, action will be required from those who are. Please take a few minutes to read this post thoroughly, as the information below should help you determine whether you will be affected by this change.

In response to advertiser and user feedback, and in an effort to provide more relevant advertising results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow certain exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.

In line with our existing policy, we will continue to require that your ad’s display URL match its destination URL (the URL of your landing page).

For example, if your destination URL is www.google.com, your display URL must also be www.google.com. The following would not be acceptable display URLs for an ad for www.google.com:

www.google.co.uk - because this URL leads to a different site
www.gogle.com - even though this URL simply redirects to www.google.com it is still not acceptable
www.gooogle.com - because this URL leads to a page showing content identical to www.google.com

Good news for those of us that like a fair playing field.