Hi,
frankly I don’t know how you make it in this niche without it nowadays, though I say that not being worth a damn at it.
I’m really struggling despite having found unique ways around the gambling ad ban with most the big PPCs and I imagine that’s true for most that don’t rely on SEO.
I know enough about seo that I could probably rank okay in any niche that doesn’t have so much competition (because whether you want to learn it or not; you pick some stuff up along the way when you’re surrounded by so many smart people … thank you folks at CAP) and I used to get a little free traffic since my rantings covered so many different areas of our industry but that fell off and I think what has happened to me is the scrapers have a much better link system built up so they’re basically using my content and combining it with their better link system and getting the traffic that I otherwise would have gotten.