Changed Plans in Past Two Months?

[MichaelCorfman]

Many webmasters have changed their plans in response to the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. I thought it would be interesting to share the types of changes individual members have made.

Michael

[pgaming]

I am not backing out of this industry, but do plan on making some changes to my sites.

greek39

[MichaelCorfman]

Casino City is making quite a few changes in response to passage of the UIGEA. We've already done an extensive job of marking what online gaming sites do and do not accept US players (down to the individual state level), and we are working on expanding that to also show players accepted for other countries besides the US. We have just finished adding an initial level of geotargeting for banner advertisements, and are going to further expand our initial implementation in that area to influence other items on our pages in addition to banner advertisments.

Our biggest plans are in the area of content in other languages. We are planning to make both our directory of online casinos and our directory of land-based casinos available in a wide variety of languages over the next several months.

Michael

[big fish]

Our biggest plans are in the area of content in other languages. We are planning to make both our directory of online casinos and our directory of land-based casinos available in a wide variety of languages over the next several months.

wow! that must be a massive project. care to share how many people it would take for such an undertaking? just curious are your sites are huge.

thanks michael...

with regards to our plans, we have been chnaging quite a bit. at first i thought it was time to move. then i was back in. lately i have been working on seo as usual. i would like to learn more abour geotargeting as this is something that would be very useful, and yet i know nothing about it.

[MichaelCorfman]

wow! that must be a massive project. care to share how many people it would take for such an undertaking? just curious are your sites are huge.

thanks michael...

Well, there are different parts, and I'm not sure I figured out exactly how many people or how much work it will actually be - we'll just throw resources at the project until it is finished, although I'm sure a dozen people will be involved by the time all is said and done.

For the online gaming site directory, we are first expanding our database infrastructure so we can capture the multiple URLs or other methods used to get to each of the language specific versions of various online gaming sites. Right now we keep track of what languages sites support, but do not keep track of language specific URLs. Then we have a project for our content group which is to go through the 2,500+ online gaming sites and enter the language specific URL information for each site.

After that, we have to build a vocabulary of phrases used in the pages we build, and change the application to get those phrases out of our database for a specific language, with english being the initial language. We figure we will first get those phrases translated for perhaps a dozen major languages, and deploy those, and after that maybe do something like 40 different languages since we think the vocabulary we are dealing with is fairly small, so that it won't be that expensive to subcontract to get good translations for quite a number of languages.

Of course, this won't deal with news or other content that is created all of the time, so we will probably not include such content on most or all of the foreign language sites - perhaps including good translations saying the news (for example) is available in English, and that machine translations of the english news are available, with translation software being used in the background to do that.

We'll end up deploying each language on a separate site because we think that is the correct approach from a search engine perspective, so we also will have some back-end infrastructure around managing all of the separate sites, and we will do some work recognizing the browser language preference to try to migrate people to the right site.

The land-based directory is similar with a few twists. We don't have to deal with language support of linked websites as we do in the online arena, but we do have some new issues, such as language-specific names for all of the geographic locations where land-based gaming properties are located.

Maybe I should refer to UIGEA as the full employment act of 2006.

Michael

[Ziggy]

I must admit, Michael, your task certainly sounds quite daunting. However, it will surely reap the rewards of the effort.

From the beginning, it has been my goal to make my site directed to a truly global audience. Obviously, the recent passge of U.S. law has sped up the pace a bit!

I have added some foreign language text links to my navigation scheme along with a few foreign language banners.

Actually, quite small changes, but my goal is to be gently welcoming to all without alienating any players.

Trying little things to see what works and what doesn't. While there is considerable debate about the meta "language" tag being useful or not, besides using just simply the code for english (en), I've added other country codes for that specific page that includes an additional language(s). I've also changed a foreign language review page content to its specific ISO character set in the header. These are strategically aimed at SEO for foreign bots. I have noticed a few dropping by lately. I hope it is a trend that continues!

We shall see how the testing comes along. Thank you as well for sharing your ideas and goals.

[jackpotcasinoguide]

I am looking for someone to translate my sites, anyone know of anyone good?

Justin

[aksana]

You have a wonderful plans, Michael! I also have plans as Napoleon's plans

What I made after the signed bill? I made a special directory for US players, and later I created a separate subdomain http://www.us.777-online-gambling.net
where I uploaded all casinos, poker rooms,bingo, sportsbooks accepting US players and marked those gambling sites that accept players not from all states.

And I have a great success with my new directory.

Now I'm working with UK subdomain and new site for UK players (I bought a domain with the same name as my main site : 777-online-gambling.co.uk)

Than I'm planning to make a directory for EU players. And of course my dream and my main goal is translating my site in more than 20 languages.

Now I've translated it only in Russian language, and only Casino directory, now I'm waiting when it will be indexed by Russian search engines that to know whether I optimised the directory well or not and after I'll start to translate other part of my site.

I have so many plans and enthusiasm that you will be tired to read it

[aksana]

Forgot to say that I changed my hosting from US to Canada, I bought a business plan with a dedicated server. And I'm very glad that I did it.

[nautikitten]

Whew! Glad that was a multipl choice poll I think I pick about seven of them. All I know is I've been doing alot more work then changing banner once a month when the new Microgaming games come out. And I'm not sure if I still have it straightened out or not.