I will obviously update this post once the results are in :)

Here is the announcement from the AGCC in full:

AGCC Commissioners, sitting as a tribunal, have today revoked the licences of Vantage Limited, Filco Limited and Oxalic Limited, trading as Full Tilt Poker (FTP), with immediate effect.  This follows the earlier suspension of the licences on 29th June 2011.

At a hearing held in London over six days, it emerged that FTP had fundamentally misled AGCC about their operational integrity by continuously reporting as liquid funds balances that had been covertly seized or restrained by US authorities, or that were otherwise not actually available to the operator.  Serious breaches of AGCC regulations include false reporting, unauthorised provision of credit, and failure to report material events.

At the commencement of these proceedings on 26th July, AGCC made clear its preference to hold the hearing in public, to the benefit of players and media alike. However, the tribunal was persuaded that the hearing should be held in camera on the basis of claims by FTP that this would maximise the chance of a commercial rescue of the business for the benefit of players. For this reason an adjournment of 54 days was allowed.

It is important to note that the revocation of FTP’s licences does not, as has been suggested, prevent a reactivation of the business under new ownership and management. Unresolved claims by players against FTP become a matter for the police and civil authorities. Now that FTP’s licences have been revoked, AGCC no longer has jurisdiction over these companies.

The licence of Orinic Limited, a recently added geographic sub-division of the FTP poker room, remains suspended.
The determination notice containing the decision of the Commissioners and reasons for it is available at

http://www.gamblingcontrol.org/userfiles/file/Determination%20Notice%20290911.pdf

What this means for the players who are still trying to extract their funds from FTP is as yet unknown, but it certainly isn't looking good...

Become a Facebook Developer

Search for the Developer App on Facebook using your search bar:

and accept the relevant permissions:

Create an OpenGraph Enabled App

Don't worry, you're not going to publish the app or anything like that, we're merely going through the motions so your Facebook profile is flagged as Developer. Click on Create New App within the Developer home page:

and give it a name and namespace, anything will do:

You'll be prompted with a CAPTCHA at this point, just fill it in and move on to the OpenGraph tab on the left hand side of the App page:

Now, OpenGraph allows apps to use the notifications where "X is [action] a [thing]" - eg: "Andy is reading some news on Newspaper". It does this by having certain words, etc, built into the app. Fill the main ones in here:

You can simply click "Save Changes and Next" on the following two pages and "Save and Finish" the final page.

Enable Facebook Timeline

Now, go back to Facebook, click on your name at the top right to go to your profile and you'll be presented with a notification for your new Facebook Timeline profile:

All done :)

The trademark in question is Interflora, the offender, none other than UK high street superbrand: Marks & Spencer. You can read more about that case over on The Register, but yesterday's news is of much more importance.

Yesterday, the EU Court of Justice (full judgement can be found here) ruled in Interflora's favour stating that M&S are in breach of trademarks in place and should not be allowed to profit off of someone else's trademark. The UK High Court needs to now follow suit with the Court of Justice's ruling, which Interflora expect to happen during the course of 2012.

If/Once the High Court applies this change, this will set the precedent for all other companies to block their competitors from bidding on brand names thus taking away potential profits from that company. That leaves a really important question ringing through my head:

Will Google block people from advertising on partial brand names?

For example, could I bid on "inter flowers" "flora inter" etc? The reason I ask, is because within this great iGaming industry in which I work, there are a lot of major players who have a pretty important word in their brand name: bet. If no partial brand-bidding will be allowed either, is it going to be a matter of advertising spend that decides on who gets to use "bet" as part of their brand name? Betfred (who, incidentally finally relaunched their site after over a year of planning, preparation, development and deployment), Betfair, Bet365, 188Bet, SkyBet, SportingBet, UniBet, BetDaq and plenty more will be fighting over it!

As some of you may or may not know, I broke my arm pretty much in half back on the 30th of March this year in a rugby accident. It's been a long road to recovery and I recently got the news that the metalwork they had put in to stabilise the break back in June has failed, quite catastrophically.

In order to keep a record (as well as keep myself sane), I have decided to backdate everything that happened thus far on a seperate blog and I'm currently in the process of writing up the posts.

For now, I've got an appointment with the surgeon tomorrow to discuss what to do about the buggered metal in my arm and to formulate some plan of action. I leave you with a link: Never Fracture Your Humerus and a picture:

If you're going to change your router, you're going to need the following bits of information:

Connection Type - PPPoE
VPI/VCI - 8/32
Encapsulation - LLC
Service Category - UBR
Telefonica ADSL Username - adslppp@telefonicanetpa
Telefonica ADSL Password - adslppp

And if you're wondering what routers you can replace it with, there are a few good modem/routers available on Amazon, but I'd probably spend the money on something reliable like the WRT54GL by Linksys.

Why am I sharing this? Because I've swapped out the standard ComTrend router for a few people now, and I keep on forgetting, so in a way, this is just to help me remember :)

I don't need to go over this in too many details as you can read about it on Dave Naylor's Blog, where he performed a number of tests. The tests though, seem flawed. Dave managed to submit the removal request for BingoPlayUk.com, a site he does not have access to under GWT, but to date, it still hasn't been removed:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Abingoplayuk.com

Nor do I think it will be removed. The issue is, unless you have blocked access to the URL or site via robots.txt or a robots meta tag, or have removed the site or page thus serving a 404, Google won't actually remove the URL. As Dave notes in his post, it warns you of this when you submit the removal request:

I'll keep an eye on the SERP for BingoPlayUK, but doubt it is going to change without a physical change to the site.

As for James and his results... linkbait-a-licious given his site is brand new? I'm not one to judge but until someone else can verify his results, I'm on the fence.

What this means, for now, is that Full Tilt must not:

1. Allow new customers to register with the site
2. Accept deposits
3. Allow existing customers to withdraw funds that are held in their account
4. Permit customers to participate in any form of poker game play or gambling transaction.

Number 4 being the big one just now. CalvinAyre.com managed to grab the below screenshot that was presented to poker clients trying to withdraw earlier today:

And it's not going to change for the players any time soon, considering the press release continues on to say:

Due to the nature of the forthcoming judicial proceedings no further comment can be made at this time. The regulatory hearing will be held on Tuesday 26 July 2011 in London.

Will the Gambling Commission on the Isle of Man now take a deeper look at PokerStars following this? PokerStars are a pretty big employer on the Island, so I'm sure they're already in deep conversations with the Gaming Commission to resolve any issues following Black Friday. It will certainly be interesting to see how that side develops!

Update: Isle of Man Gambling Commission Statement Released

This evening, the Gambling Supervision Commission on the Isle of Man released a statement confirming that PokerStars were operating within the boundaries of their license which:

remains unchanged following today's statement from the Gambling Control Commission in Alderney.

More information can be found here: http://www.gov.im/gambling/

Having worked on a number of projects here, I can testify to the way the Betfred online business is moving. Things are getting more streamlined and the online operation really is priority number one. Testament to that is the recent acquisition of Bucky Bingo and BOGOF Bingo to further boost the online offerings.

Betfred is said to be preparing to rebrand all Tote shops in the UK, but the online operations will need to be carefully worked out. Betfred runs on Finsoft's Margin Maker, where as ToteSport.com is well known to run on Orbis' platform. The "merger" between these two platforms will NOT be pretty, never mind easy.

I look forward to watching it all unfold... here's to Fred, his team and everyone who has worked on the project to date.

The not so simple problem, is that with the number of stakeholders within any sizeable organisation who share responsibility for the website, marketing and acquisition channels, development and technical assistance, SEO - and some of the responsibilities that fall under an SEO consultant/employee's remit - can unfortunately be overlooked.

In my line of work, and I would hazard a guess in many SEO consultants' working weeks, there are a number of situations that have a habit of catching you surprise, when one of said company stakeholders has "done something" without consulting you first. Here are my top 4 (either personally experienced or through stories from other SEOs):

What's analytics?

Too many times to count
Scenario: Person A has put a page up regarding a new promotion, and wants to know how many hits the page has had, how many registrations or sales said promotion has brought in and how much profit they have made the company after all costs (including that huge billboard they put up, as well as a ton of PPC traffic purchased).

Issue: Person A got the dev team to put the page up urgently as the billboard was about to be unveiled, and they didn't tell the person who heads up analytics (usually tied in closely with SEO) about the page, which simply linked to the registration form, or product category.

Result: SEO/Analytics person gets it in the ear for not tracking the page and resulting traffic (it's his/her responsibility to know about every page, after all!), thus nobody's able to work out if said promotion was a success or another massive failure.

Why are people finding our page!?

This one actually happened quite recently
Scenario: Person B has put a page up regarding a new promotion through a media buyer. The promotion is only open to visitors arriving from said channel and nobody else.

Issue: Person B got the dev team to put the page up urgently as the offer was about to go live, and they didn't tell the SEO about the page. The resulting popularity of the page pushed it up the SERPs organically until it ranked 2nd or 3rd for the brand name, with nice juicy "Sign up now for a big promotion!" title tag, matching description, etc... it really was an offer you couldn't pass up.

Result: SEO person gets it in the ear for not blocking the page and resulting organic traffic (it's his/her responsibility to know about every page, after all!), thus they had to give the offer to some people who had not arrived through the correct acquisition channel until the SEO could get the page removed from the index (fortunately, they did it quite quickly!).

Why isn't our site appearing for brand searches?

My favourite story from a friend at a big SEO agency about a very well known brand
Scenario: Person C hires a big design (not SEO) agency to build them a brand new, shiny, sparkling website. It's all singing, all dancing, you name it, it's got it! The proverbial mutt's!

Issue: Person C requested that the design agency to put the site up urgently as they wanted to launch the website before a specific event, and they didn't consult anyone in regards to SEO, but expected the site to rank quite quickly (it was backed by a big UK brand, after all). The site was up in plenty of time, press releases went out, lots of nice, top media websites picked up the story, linked back to the site, no love from the big G. The design agency just don't understand what's going on. It's been weeks since the site launched, why is it not appearing for any searches regarding the product/service?

Result: SEO consultant gets called in by the brand, makes one change to robots.txt (apparently it hadn't been amended since the site was in test, when they didn't want any search engines finding it) and all is well (it's his/her job to know these sorts of things, after all.)

Why don't we rank for our own story instead of these press release syndication sites?

You can lead a horse to water...
Scenario: Person D distributes many press releases on behalf of their client, replicates the press release on their own website, but never seems to rank for stories about their client, even though the PR was on their site first. The PR distributor and numerous sites who syndicate content always outrank them.

Issue: Person D always includes a few links in the press release, but as we all know, the PR distribution company always includes a link back to the version of the PR on their site... Person D, unfortunately, does not!

Result: SEO gets bugged, repeatedly, whenever this happens, even though they have given Person D instructions on how to optimise their press release distribution method.

Conclusion

Everything and anything can have an effect - positive or negative - on your website. Submitting a story to a bookmarking site brought this very site down back in November last year, because I hadn't expected such a high volume of traffic, enough to bring my host down! On and offline marketing/PR efforts, promotions, etc... they all have an effect on your SEO.

The time has come for SEO to be seen as a complimentary channel to all other marketing channels, be they for acquisition, retention, reactivation... even - as I've recently spoke to an online casino about - reputations can be managed through search and SEO.