Last week Yahoo! Search Marketing updated its PPC gambling policy. It now accepts bids on general sports-related terms without modifiers for gambling clients. Examples include the following:
- (i) sports-related (e.g. “football” or “tennis”);
- (ii) specific sporting events (e.g. “Wimbledon” or “FA Cup”)
- (iii) sporting teams (e.g. “Arsenal” or “Milan versus Manchester”)
In essence, prior to this change Yahoo’s Gambling Guidelines did not permit advertisers to bid on keywords such as ‘football’, ‘wimbledon’ – basically general sports related terms (teams, sports, events, gambling games etc) without a modifier. This meant you had to bid on ‘football BET’ or ‘poker WAGER’.
However Yahoo now accept keywords without modifiers, so you can bid on terms such as ‘Arsenal vs Manchester Utd’ or ‘6 nations’…without putting a modifier in (e.g. bet, betting, wager, gamble).
This is a sports event search, without a modifier directly relating to gambling:
In order to get new terms approved you will need to send these to your representative or support team at Yahoo!, they will then be added to the gambling filter database – and acceptable keywords will be uploaded to your account.
We expect this move is in keeping with Google also loosening their policies on gambling-related terms in recent weeks.