To be honest I’ve never bothered with search engines, I’ve no idea where it’s ranked. – I figure that the casinos have large teams of full time professionals working on seo and there’s little chance of a lone portal owner being able to compete. I get a fair amount from google and its bots are forever trawling through my forum, I guess it realises that all the articles in the forum are indeed unique.
I’ve always used ppc traffic, and until the last few months or so this provided a very healthy profit margin but now it is actually negative. With no ppc traffic it would still be a profitable site and provide an ample living wage I imagine and anyone with even moderate experience with seo or even other ad buying methods such as email lists etc could very easily make a large profit – but it’s too much for me to do on my own.