Today I was searching for “Bingo” on Google only to find a little surprise waiting for me on the first page of the SERPs. After looking at it for 30 seconds I realised that there was something strange the results. It seems like one of the UK’s biggest bingo brands, Gala Bingo, has two entries in the Top 10 - gala-bingo & galabingo.

Yes, two different domain names with the same company name. Interesting…. I thought that clicking the results would take me to two different sites so I tried that. Clicking on the non-hyphenated version took me to the official Gala website via a splash page. Clicking on the hyphenated version took me to a landing page with a huge link saying “Play Bingo Online”. Clicking on that took me to the non-hyphenated site.

Were they maybe the official site and an affiliate? It doesn’t look like it. A quick check of the whois information showed that they both gala-bingo & galabingo are owned by the same company: Gala Group Investments Limited. So what was going on here?

A quick look at the source code of the hyphenated domain showed some hidden text, <h1> tags used with images and other optimisation techniques that seem to go against the guidelines supplied to webmasters by Google & the other engines. There are a number of questions that occurred to me:

• Did they really need to split the club finder from the rest of the online bingo site?
• If there was such a need to split it, why do they have a link using up 50% of the screen sending visitors to the other site?
• Why do they need to use hidden text?

I guess that Gala just haven’t read the Google guidelines, or maybe they’re just following the example of the search engines who have also recently taken to some slightly gray methods of optimisation.

If nothing else, at least this supports the theory that it’s better to hyphenate words in URLs as the hyphenated version of the Gala site ranks more highly than the other one!

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