Google & Yahoo Say No to Online Gambling Ads

2007 May 16, Jonny Vincent

Online search engines are caught in an ironic situation. News reports are stating that Google is not accepting paid search ads for online gambling companies, and that Yahoo has followed suit. Yet if you create hard-core pornography, you can easily buy paid advertisement on the world's largest online search engines.

The search engines and the online gambling industries are growing so rapidly, executives in these companies are finding it hard to set a logical moral code, creating some bizarre contradictions.

Publicly-listed market leaders like PartyGaming and 888 cannot buy paid advertising on Google, but a backyard operation in Southeast Asia producing hard-core pornography is able to list their products at the top of search results? What kind of world are we living in?

The reasoning behind the Google and Yahoo logic is unknown. Their policy of not accepting paid advertisements from online gambling companies does nothing to affect search engine optimization (SEO). With quality SEO, online gambling companies can still place themselves at the top of natural searches for selected keywords. All the nonsensical policy appears to achieve is removing a massive revenue stream for both the search engines and online gambling companies.

A final point to consider about the policy: If Google and Yahoo allowed paid search ads, these would mostly be snapped up by the largest, most respected online gambling companies. Without paid search ads for the online gambling industry, Google and Yahoo are (in effect) leveling the playing field, forcing the respected market leaders to compete in SEO terms with smaller, possibly unethical, online gambling companies. By not allowing the large online gambling companies to buy paid advertisement, customers who wish to gamble online are more likely to gamble with unreputable operators, if those fly-by-night operators place higher on the natural search lists through superior SEO.

Betfair's Mark Davies made the obvious point: "It's a curious place to draw the line if their reasoning is morality."