Last week in London, I sat in on the organic listings forum, where myself, Dave Naylor, Greg Boser, Mikkel DeMib & Barry Lloyd fielded a slough of great questions. One exchange in particular stands out to me - the lone white hat on the panel (though I've certainly been accused of being at least a bit gray hat for my public views on link buying). It featured a question from the audience regarding the incredibly competitive niche of online gambling - poker in particular. The other panelists discussed how most sites ranking at the top of the SERPs for queries like "play poker online" and "texas hold 'em" achieved their positions; primarily by pointing low quality junk at slightly higher quality sites in an ever-expanding pyramid built largely on a base of spam.

I stood out from the crowd (and got a few chuckles from my fellow panelists) when I suggested that it might be possible to use only white hat methods - linkbaiting, viral marketing, building a better site, etc. - to rank for these terms. Luckily, none of my colleagues pointed out that while all of them had done work in this arena and, at one time or another, had clients ranking for these phrases, I never had. Thanks for keeping my inexperience under wraps, guys.

Of course, over the last 5 days, I've been pouring over ideas in my head of how to make a white-hat site actually rank well in an arena dominated by high-quality spam. The incentive to rank in this segment is overwhelming, with profits ranging from 7 to 8 or 9 figures in many cases. With this much expendable income for marketing and competitive SEO, is it any wonder that few of the sites in the SERPs I've linked to last any longer than a few hours or days?

Some of the more established sites (PartyPoker, FullTiltPoker, Bodog, 888, etc.) have hundreds of thousands of backlinks, a good portion of which are fully white-hat. In addition, they've got history, good on-page optmiization and the depth of experience in the field that would be tough for anyone outside of my panel cohorts to match.

So, what do you think? Is there a chance that a pure white-hat site could reach the top of the SERPs for poker and gambling terms in a reasonable period of time - say 18-24 months?