I'm amazed to see how many people ALMOST have clean sites. No meds, no porn, no mortage links - but then they have links to online casino sites. Ugh. If you live in the US, online gambling is illegal and linking to these sites puts you in a bad neighborhood. What is your take on this?
Online gambling is not technically illegal for the person placing the bet, but in the general sense you are correct. I believe that law will be repealed in the next 10 months or so. I doubt it will happen before the end of the session, but likely when they come back after the elections and we have a new administration. There is a pretty quality bill with a lot of backing to repeal the UIGEA and the banks are behind it. As far as what the search engines see, I don't know. I see Gambling as a much different animal than Porn and Prescription drugs. Gambling is as American as Baseball and Apple Pie. Bingo, Lottery, Horse Racing, Las Vegas, etc. If you're linking to quality gambling websites I'm not sure there is a problem. The problem arises when you are linking to some of the what seems to be one trillion worthless spammy affiliate gambling sites. That is no different than linking to any other low quality site. I don't think the topic of gambling alone will kill your site.
Websites serve more then American visitors. And if memory serves me right there is a WTO complaint against the US for outlawing online gambling. I guess other countries want some of that American $ before it all vanishes. shortbus appears to know more about the laws, so I will step aside...
is online gambling illegal in the eyes of google? no. as long as you don't link to really bad, spammy neighborhoods and your link makes some sense within your page you should be fine.