There are currently 6 responses to “Bill’s Gamblin Hall and Saloon???”

1. 1

   On February 9th, 2007, kim said:

   i mentioned earlier about being a downtown person, not a strip person. but i was becoming fond of barbary coast, including, of course, the cool name. it looks good hanging atop the corner.
   i’ve only been here a teeny while, this will be my first experience of lost vegas culture and cultural value. really really fuckin’ sad.

2. 2

   On February 11th, 2007, Paul T. said:

   I love your website! i think it is by far the best las vegas website on the web. Everybody in my office loves it too. You are the first feed on my rss list. You don’t have the same boring fluff piece perspective that every single other website has. You actually tell it like it is. Nobody else does that. I think this is the only original vegas site on the web. Everything else just wants you to book tickets or rooms through their site and tell you the same general information about everything. If you have seen one las vegas site you have seen them all.

   I have a question. Why are you not ranked higher on google or yahoo. The only reason I know you is because the people in my office know you. I would never find you with a web search. what gives? Is google so bad at delivering quality content? Im sorry but it just bugs me.

3. 3

   On February 12th, 2007, VegasRex said:

   Hello Paul,

   Thank you very much for the high praise indeed. Your check is in the mail ;-)

   Not sure that anyone would agree (myself included), but it is damn nice to hear.

   There are several reasons that we are not listed in search engines:

   Main and most important reason … we don’t care about our search ranking. Seriously. We could not possibly care less. And we do very little to try to achieve higher rankings. If we wanted to, could we? Probably. But what would be the point?

   We have a cult following of insane freaks with really bad taste in websites. We are currently bookmarked on over 15,000 RSS feeds, and average over 50,000 unique visitors per day … and we have only existed for 3 months! Is that huge? Hell no. But, we are really flattered by those numbers. And the scary thing is that it grows by the week. I shudder to think what would happen if we hit Google’s radar. Vegas freaks just tend to find us one way or another. Casual/indifferent Vegas folks have no idea that we exist.

   If I told you the amount of time, money, and effort that people spent “Search Engine Optimizing” their sites, you probably wouldn’t believe me. And when you start spending as much time worrying about search engines as you worry about content, then things start going south, IMHO. I’ve seen it happen first hand … repeatedly. People who don’t hit the first page of Google drop what they are doing content-wise, and begin obsessively “optimizing”.

   Google, Yahoo, etc have become de-facto “Credit Bureaus” of websites. They (supposedly) determine a sites worthiness to exist, and people spend tons of time “maintaining a good credit rating” by kissing the ass of these corporations.

   Google currently has a market cap of nearly $100 Billion. Yes, with a “B”.

   We don’t feel the need to be validated by these guys. Frankly the relevance of search results has started suffering over the years because more and more people are figuring out how to game the search spiders, and the most useful site on any given topic may well be on page 15.

   So, why exactly do web spiders choose to particularly ignore us?

   It’s simple. Because nobody links to us. A MAJOR part of the search engine algorithm is the amount of sites that link to another site. This is why people register hundreds of domains that exist simply to link to each other, set up link exchanges to juice their link count, pay outside companies to SPAM blogs with trackback links, and employ all kinds of techniques that give them top placement on popular search engines.

   Does this mean that these sites are the best in their class? Not necessarily. Unless the search is for something obscure like “lifespan of the dung beetle”, search results for heavily-searched terms like “Las Vegas” will more or less yield random results.

   Very little of our traffic comes from search engines, and that’s perfectly cool with us.

   One thing that may be interesting is the development of an Open Source search engine, which is currently in the works:

   http://slashdot.org/articles/07/02/14/1355252.shtml

   Something like this, if it worked, may actually be worthwhile.

4. 4

   On February 19th, 2007, Cliff said:

   I found you off the Drudge Report today. Your story on the shootings must your most read ever if it made it there. I am glad I found your site it is much better than all the other VEGAS sites. GOOD work I will be on this site for updates all the time now.

5. 5

   On February 21st, 2007, Sarah said:

   I only just found out about what a great place Barbary Coast is and was planning on booking accommodation there when we are in Vegas in September (from Australia) for our wedding. I don’t think so now. I can’t tell people that we are staying at Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall and Saloon!!! It sounds so retarded.

6. 6

   On March 8th, 2007, jen said:

   Look familiar? http://www.billslasvegas.com/

   Their new name on the side of the building isn’t up yet, but their photo is up.

   Your photo on this post must have inspired them. ;-)