Mark Davies leaves BetFair -but the SEO cretins stay.

One month ago, I reported that BetFair silenced their PR chief (Mark Davies) by moving him to regulation affairs and asking him to shut up his voluble gob. Office politics played against him. Too bad.

Well, as Mark Davies can&#8217-t live in the dark (away from the limelights), he has resigned, and started off his own company, Camberton &#8212-so as to do what BetFair was recently forbidding him to do (PR). I wish him good luck, with 2 caveats.

#1. Mark Davies&#8217-s true love is in fact journalism. But it doesn&#8217-t pay, unless you do TV prominently. If Mark had bollocks, he would go into journalism.

#2. Mark Davies is a SEO virgin (&#8220-Camberton&#8221- is of course notably absent from Google), who was taking tips at BetFair from the world&#8217-s crappiest SEOs. Mark Davies will have to learn web marketing. (I am not even sure Mark knows what &#8220-SEO&#8221- stands for.) And there&#8217-s the WordPress factor. Mike Robb got it, but Mark never did.

Leaving BetFair is a good thing &#8212-provided he can learn in the open what he couldn&#8217-t learn while at BetFair: Marketing 2.0.

My 2 minutes (and 4 seconds) of fame – [VIDEO]

Google&#8217-s Matt Cutts answers my SEO question:

On your WordPress.org blog (mattcutts.com), why did you switch from domainname.com/year/month/day/sample-post/ to domainname.com/postname/ ? Has this to do with how PageRank flows within a site?

#1 -above The Guardian… and far above BetFair.

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UPDATE:

PREVIOUSLY: BetFair impose new “Premium Charges”… Do BetFair gag the critics, too?

UPDATE: They announce a Q&amp-A.

InTrade DOT NET – www.intrade.net

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This post is a very short review of their new website. I might publish a deeper review, later on.

The log line is that InTrade CEO John Delaney has ingested all the innovations that HubDub has brought to the prediction market scene since January 2007 (e.g., long and rich prediction market webpages that are indexed by the search engines, and use of social networking to boost trading) and has asked his technological team to clone those innovations for InTrade. This is great. I also appreciate that their charting system is satisfying. (The advanced charts seem to be of the right size, I have noticed. Neither too small, nor too big.)

On the negative side, the execution is not as good as it should be &#8212-and I&#8217-m polite. But to be fair with them, they say their website is still in &#8220-beta&#8221- &#8212-so let&#8217-s give them time to improve their work.

Overall, it&#8217-s a good move, and it shows, as I have said for months, that Nigel Eccles of HubDub is having a profound impact on the prediction market industry.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that InTrade.net presents probabilities expressed in percentage, not prices, which they also took from HubDub.

OLYMPIC MEDALS: The Los Angeles Times cites HubDub -but not BetFair, TradeSports, NewsFutures, or YooPick.

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Los Angeles Times

Could it be because the journalist had googled &#8220-Olympics&#8221- for his/her research?

HubDub is the only prediction exchange whose prediction market webpages are indexed well by Google.

SEO is key for marketing and P.R., folks &#8212-you see the evidence under your very nose with HubDub and the Olympics.

How to optimize your prediction market blog (e.g., Midas Oracle, Caveat Bettor) or prediction exchange website (e.g., InTrade, TradeSports, BetFair, NewsFutures, HubDub) for Google Web Search -and all the other search engines out there.

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Interview of Google&#8217-s Matt Cutts by USA Today.

The basic SEO tips.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • The FaceBook profiles of the 2 most important men of the field of prediction markets
  • THE HUMAN GADFLY WHOSE OBJECTIONS ROBIN HANSON IS DUCKING…???…
  • Google now considers Midas Oracle as a major blog.
  • Horizon 2015: A long-term strategic perspective for the real-money prediction markets
  • Join our group at LinkedIn to have your “Prediction Markets” badge on your profile. It’s ‘chic’. (“Groups” info should be set as “visible”, in your profile options.) We are 63 this early Saturday morning —keeps growing.
  • If you have been using PayPal to fund your InTrade, TradeSports or BetFair account, please, check that horror story.
  • 48 hours after the launch of the “Prediction Markets” group at LinkedIn, we have already 52 members —both prediction market luminaries and simple people (trading the event derivatives or collecting the market-generated probabilities).