And I am not sure what you mean by good examples. The GamblingSiteFinder one doesn't even have rankings based on reviews. The rankings on the front page are manually picked and seem to be based on who's paying the most. That doesn't seem very transparent. - Their reviews themselves look good though.
Firstly, thank you very much for taking the time to visit and critique my site. Good or bad, I appreciate the honesty from your first impressions on my site. I know every website owner
says that they don't take affiliate commissions into consideration when conducting reviews, but there are some additional things I
do to try and be more transparent.
For starters, the obvious is that some of my highest ranked sites don't even have affiliate programs eg. Bustabit and Bustadice.
Next, while all of my outbound links are cloaked, if you click through them you'll see that many aren't even affiliate links. This is most noticeable/impactful in the Poker category (particularly the sites in the top 5), but this is also true about the Software, Exchange, Forex, DFS, and Training categories as well.
Lastly, if you go to my site's changelog you'll see which reviews are monetized. Almost every review is in fact monetized, but I do at least try to be upfront about that. In the future I plan to put disclosures within the review pages themselves.
I don't think user votes are particularly useful, as most users aren't familiar with the industry to give informed votes. And you'll just get some dodgy casino that incentivizes users to vote on your site, and skew things for ever. But it could definitely be nice to have as a "editors rating" and "players rating" perhaps.
This exactly. Right now my site allows players to leave a star rating between 1-5, but having both and allowing visitors to see the discrepancy between the editor and the player pool is a much better method.
And to your point about dodgy casinos incentivizing users to cast votes, this is entirely true. I've already had two online gambling sites (both of which are no longer listed) do exactly what you said - give
thousands of 1-star ratings to each of their competitors and 5-star ratings to themselves.
According to their webpage, it's more or less in exchange for a backlink. But even if it was for cash, I don't really think that's problematic as long as they're not changing the reviews/score based on it. (Of course we don't know that for certain...
But that's really the thing. If you receive money(Or even just a good backlink for that matter) from a site in exchange for something that may be meaningless in itself, you do also have greater incentive to intentionally or unintentionally for that matter manipulate the scores in their favor. It only really have to be marginals to actually make a difference there.
I guess there is no way for me to prove that I don't accept money in exchange for better rankings aside from just taking my word for it. But regarding the backlink, we actually request that it be a "No Follow" link, which holds far less value [if any at all] than a "Do Follow" link. IMHO, that was the most fair and honest way.
This is all a meaningless discussion though because to date there hasn't been a single site that has reached out to me about regarding the Trusted Partner program.
I'm sorry for coming into your thread and turning the discussion towards my site. I just went and checked out Crypto-Gambling.net and it looks like you're off to an excellent start. I wish you the best of luck, and if you'd ever like to chat hit me up!