Hi everyone, and welcome back to The iGaming SEO Show, episode 5. I’m Alan, and I’m joined today by our iGaming SEO guru, Ari. Guru — is that a good name for you? I like it, we’ll roll with that. Wizard, maybe. We’ll let you choose next time. How are you? Good, keeping busy as usual.

What’s new in the iGaming SEO space? February already. We’ve had ICE and IGB done — that was really good, actually. I didn’t realise there were 65,000 people attending. It’s massive, and it only seems to be getting bigger. I laugh about it because I speak to contacts who were there too — the first day you spend getting lost trying to find your way around. Any conference where they hand you a map is usually an indication it’s a big thing. The map was actually quite complicated because there were two conferences running at the same time, and one of them had two levels. I was speaking to people with meetings on the other level trying to find it. So you spend day one getting lost, and then the next couple of days actually getting to the meetings — it’s a good thing you dedicated three days to it. One day of exploring and getting lost, second day of actually doing business, and then two days to recover.

 

Why are links so important for iGaming SEO specifically?

Links are important in general because of the way the algorithm has been designed from day one. It’s a bit flawed by design. Once you take off your technical SEO and your content, the only thing Google can really use to judge you is how popular you are — and that’s links. Traffic comes into play too, but links are a major, major factor for rankings. I’ve been doing this for 18 years and that hasn’t changed. It’s not going to change in the future either, because LLMs and AI search engines are actually using the same signals. You need your link game right.

 

Is link building the main factor, or just one of many?

I’d say it’s the main factor. Once you’ve ticked off the technical side — once you know Google can actually index your website as a basic thing — and once you know you can actually get content seen and ranked, after that it is pretty much a game of links.

What really helps is getting loads of traffic from other sources. If you’re doing TV advertising or advertising generally, and you have a lot of direct traffic or people searching your brand in Google, that massively accelerates things. We call it a social boost — how viral you actually get. That amplifies everything, and if you’re doing that, you’re going to need fewer links. It really depends on the situation and the market. If you’re entering a competitive market, you need a lot more. If it’s a new emerging market, you can probably get away with less.

 

Do natural, unsolicited backlinks happen in iGaming?

They do, but a lot less frequently because of the stigma around gambling and casinos in general. Newspapers, blogs, magazines and websites aren’t going to naturally link to a gambling brand or a casino. It’s seen as a bit risky, and there’s a stigma — though it is getting better. They also know they can charge for it, so they’d rather charge for it.

 

So is iGaming SEO essentially pay to play?

I’d say so. There are other things you can do to get links — digital PR, for example — but you still have to pay for that service, unless you have the in-house capacity, the angles, and the processes to do it yourself. Which is difficult, because with digital PR you could have three or four campaigns running and it’s not guaranteed you’ll get results. So yes, unfortunately it’s pay to play. You’re not going to rank for free in this space, not with free links.

 

What does a healthy iGaming backlink profile look like?

In terms of types of sites, it’s changed over the past few years. You used to be able to just go out and buy links — even cheap ones — and it would work. Now you need a certain quality to actually move the needle. You need good quality casino or sports links. You need to look at things like topical trust flow and trust flow in Majestic. They need to be relevant.

Then you need all your social links — the entities we’ve talked about before. If Google’s looking at your website, they need to see that you’re a real brand — that you haven’t just gone and bought these links and they can’t prove it. You need a footprint on all the social networks, on Trustpilot and other review sites, citations. That’s become more important. You need to be seen as a real business.

The first thing I’d do, even without touching paid links, is build out all the social entities, all your social channels, review channels, citations — basically any free link on a major platform. Take that off first, and then you can go after your paid links. So you get your technical out of the way, get some content up, then get the social and citation piece in place, and only after that move on to outreach.

Once that’s all in place, you want to diversify. If you’re competing in a single market, look at the local links you can get — something relevant to that market you’re trying to rank in. Then it’s a mixture of other websites like digital PR — the big tier-one newspapers and magazines. Typically these are massive sites. If you get one link from them, it’s the equivalent of maybe 50 of the lower quality ones that you’re buying. You need a diversified portfolio of links pointing back to your website.

 

Do people in iGaming underestimate this groundwork?

I’d say so. A lot of brands are stuck in the past. Going straight for paid links does work, but you need to take a few other things off first to have a long-term sustainable strategy and growth. You’ll have to do them at some point anyway, so taking them off at the start is a good way to do it. You don’t have to be actively posting on every social media channel — when you launch a brand with a small team, nobody has the capacity to be engaged on every channel and on Trustpilot and all these sites. But even an initial presence there helps, and you can be active on one or two and slowly build that out.

 

Which social platforms matter most right now?

Good question. At the moment, from a brand protection and a rankings point of view, Google is really favouring Trustpilot. You’re seeing a lot of black hats using Trustpilot for that — manipulating it. They see the value in it. It’s the flavour of the month. In the past, we had Reddit — Reddit is still very, very prominent. Facebook is still pretty big. Really important to get onto it. It’s huge for ads too. It’s still a legit, massive channel. But there are certain sites that are being favoured more by Google at the moment — so you need to be paying attention to that. You might have a presence across 20, but you’re hyperfocusing on two or three that are actually driving results.

 

How many referring domains do you actually need? Quality vs quantity.

It comes down to the market, the competition in that space, and the quality of the links your competitors have. Those are the three key things I start with to determine how competitive a market is and how much it’s going to cost for a brand to compete.

If you take the UK, for example — super competitive. It’s going to take a lot of money to rank unless you do it in a black hat way. If you take South Africa, that’s going to take less because there’s less competition. When you look at the profiles, you can see some of them have been there for years and have a large backlink profile with quality links, but there are still holes — you can slot in, find a gap, and rank faster.

 

Is black hat SEO making a comeback in iGaming?

I just finished recording another podcast on this, actually, and it’s quite interesting — it feels like it’s 2013 and history is repeating itself. It’s the same tactics: expired domains that people buy and then spam with links, put up content, do four or five or even ten different experiments, and they only need a couple to win and stick. Once they get deranked, they canonicalise to another website, copy all the content over, and it works.

The issue is that Google is focusing too much on the whole AI race. It’s almost like they’ve been distracted from focusing on the basics. People are taking advantage straight away. If you can bring FTDs to the table cheaper than spending years building your brand up in Google, fair play.

 

Do link metrics like Trust Flow and Citation Flow actually matter?

You need to look at metrics, but there are things you should look at before you dive into the metric side — and those are more important. The first thing I’d look at is whether the website has relevant traffic, or even traffic at all. Is it indexed? Is it ranking in Google? Is the traffic relevant? Is the link placement going to make sense, does it look natural? Those are the things you should be looking at before you look at metrics.

I think a lot of SEOs blindly look at metrics before even checking if the site is indexed. You need to remember that link metrics are from a third-party company — it’s not Google itself.

 

What’s the priority order when evaluating a prospective link?

Start at the top. Number one: is the site indexed? If it’s not on Google, you’re not getting any value. Number two: does it have traffic? Number three: is the traffic relevant? If yes, it looks like a good option. Then look at things like where the link is going to be placed. Are there tricky things like robots.txt blocking that folder from passing value? Is it part of a big network that might harm your website?

 

How do you tell if a site’s traffic is actually relevant?

There are tools you can use — SEMrush, SE Ranking, that kind of platform. If you’re buying a link from what we call a “farm”, you can take one look at the website and see posts about pharma, casino, crypto — whatever. You want something more relevant to your niche — an actual blog talking about roulette tactics or blackjack tactics, where the content is uniform and topically relevant to your brand.

Those are the ones you want to take off first. You look at the traffic, whether it’s indexed, whether the traffic is relevant, where the link is going to be placed, and then you can look at third-party metrics like trust flow, citation flow, topical trust flow. Does the link profile look okay, or is it spammed? Is it a website that’s going to be around in a year’s time if you’re paying a price for it? Check the IP address to see it’s not part of a network.

A lot of these metrics can be manipulated. I remember when I first started, we’d look at PageRank — we had a browser extension that showed you the PR out of five. You’d buy 10 PR3 links, maybe three PR5 links, and judge everything on that. But it could be manipulated quite easily, so if you didn’t take a deeper dive, you didn’t really know what you were buying.

 

Why am I being outranked by a site with fewer links?

Quality over quantity — that’s the first thing I’d look at, with tech and content aside. You can easily go out and buy links for peanuts, but it’s about the quality of that link. That’s why we have a process in place — we vet every single link, and we spend a lot of time making sure that if we’re spending anywhere from $100 to $1,000, we’re actually getting quality that’s going to move the needle.

 

What link building tactics actually work in 2026?

Traditional outreach — actually reaching out to webmasters, negotiating pricing, getting links — or even going to a marketplace. There are loads of marketplaces popping up selling links, and that works quite well, as long as you vet the quality.

Building the cheaper kind of links, the PBNs — you need to be careful with that. It might not even harm your website, but Google might just completely ignore those links and you waste your time. It comes back to quality over quantity.

Traditional outreach works well. You can also get useful links from relevant industry forums. We talked about social entities and all the different sites you want to take off initially — those are all free. You need a good mix: different sources linking back to you, and you need to be sustainable with your approach.

We’ve had clients start for six months then drop off because it’s not working fast enough — that’s the nature of SEO, you have to give it time. Then they come back at it, and you see the organic visibility peak and drop because they’ve lost everything. You need to give it time. Once you actually get to the point where you’re bringing in FTDs, then you accelerate — but sustainably. No sudden spikes, unless you can justify it with viral traffic. Velocity is a really big factor. If you can team that up with other channels sending more traffic, you hit the right spot — and that’s where you start competing for the tier-one keywords.

 

Is guest posting still worth doing?

Yeah, absolutely. There were a few networks in the past that got penalised just because they got too big — like anything, if a tactic gets too big and Google notices, they take action. But guest posting — approaching another website and saying “I’ve got a post I could place on your website with a backlink back to mine” — still works well. They’ll usually ask for a fee in iGaming because everything’s paid, that’s the nature of the industry, but those editorial placements work really well.

 

Guest post vs niche edit — which is better?

Niche edits — placing a link on an existing article — work really well too. In some cases the webmaster will charge more to write a brand new article from scratch than to insert a link into an existing one. So insertions are usually the cheaper option, and they often work better because you can look at a website, find a page already ranking for relevant terms, and by placing your link on that page you’re inheriting history, existing traffic, and rankings. A fresh post has none of that.

What you can do on top of that is ping that page through an indexer, just to give it an extra nudge. That’s something we’ve been looking at a lot recently. A lot of people forget about this — they build links and then let them sit, and eventually forget about them, when really you’ve got a live link with value you can refresh. It’s a quick win, cheaper than buying a new link, and you can do it for hundreds of pages.

Omega Indexer is a good one. There are so many solutions out there — I’d recommend trying a few different ones and seeing what results you get.

 

How can AI help with link building?

We use it on a day-to-day basis for all our processes. In terms of outreach, it gets more complicated because you need to build a framework for it to reach out to prospects, get replies, and manage responses — you’d need to hook it up to a few different software programs. But a simple way to use AI is to help design and write your outreach templates.

We tend to use it for data tasks that would otherwise take hours of manual labour — that’s where it really shortens the cycle. My advice is: get used to using it on a day-to-day basis, and don’t be afraid to ask it something ridiculous. I was that person who wouldn’t ask, but once I got into the habit, in most cases it’s capable of doing the thing, and it really surprised me. It’s only going to grow, and it’s changing fast.

 

Are old-school scraping tools still valuable?

Yes. Scrapebox is the goat — the OG of tools people still use, and it’s cheap. It’s pretty old school, maybe 20 years old, at least. It was originally used by spammers — you could spam blog comments, all kinds of things. We used it to scrape a lot of keywords and find links. You can take the output and feed it into AI to sort your results, so you can do prospecting super fast.

That’s the cheap option — the sort of tech-guy-in-a-dark-room-on-a-low-budget option. There are other tools with much friendlier UX. Pitchbox is a good one too. It comes down to anything that can save you time — if you’re trying to build links in such a competitive industry, you want to be doing anything that buys you even a tiny bit back.

We’re at a stage now with some clients where we’ve been doing it for years and it’s difficult to find links with the right metrics and traffic that actually move the needle. So we’re looking at additional categories — topics that are relevant but maybe not as tightly relevant — to open up supply. It’s always evolving.

 

Why are iGaming links so expensive now?

I remember days when you could get a link for £10 or £20. Back then — say 10 years ago — it was a popular industry, but there were not that many players doing SEO. Now it’s absolutely flooded. Most markets are completely saturated, new operators keep coming in. Because essentially everybody’s scraping the same big link profiles to find opportunities, eventually the webmasters realise their price can be nudged up significantly. They understand the value and they know the market rate. That’s why you get the price tag you get when you email them.

It’s been pretty static over the past few years though. We outreach to a lot of websites daily and you still get some price tags back that are absolutely crazy — someone asking three grand for a link. We know we can get something else for $150 or $300. So it’s about getting all those options on the table and selecting the ones that make financial sense, because at the end of the day, it’s about making money for your clients.

 

What’s a realistic monthly link budget for a new operator?

If you’re launching into a market — say for affiliate marketing, or you just want to protect your branded rankings — I’d say you need to be spending at least around £2,000 a month on links as a very low-budget baseline. And you want to be doing that before you launch. Ideally, you have some sort of landing page in place, or a version of the website that’s not operational but lets you index something in Google and start the link building.

That number comes from needing to acquire good quality link stacks to start building those rankings — especially initially, because you’re going to be competing with affiliates that already have big existing link profiles. You need roughly that to start getting some good links. Then you can ramp up once you’ve protected your brand, built up search volume, and you’re getting a decent amount of FTDs — at which point you can start looking into non-brand. Is there a gap in the market you can move into quickly? I say “quickly” — never say that word in SEO — but you know what I mean.

You’re not going to rank for “online casino” from day one. It’s unrealistic. Even in year one, it’s unrealistic unless you’re doing black hat. You have to be realistic. You protect your brand, you focus on other channels — affiliates, influencers — and in the background you’re building SEO. There’s a tipping point, maybe after 12 months of investment, where you start seeing non-brand FTDs come in, and you can increase your budget. As long as you’re sustainable, you’ll be fine. A lot of new operators get that order wrong, and affiliates end up outranking them for their own branded terms, stealing their traffic and selling it back to them or sending it elsewhere.

 

How many links should £2,000 get you?

I’ll give you the classic SEO answer: it depends. The £2,000 figure is a case-by-case thing, but realistically you need that in a market to at least protect your branded rankings. We aim to get links at a good price point, and we negotiate heavily. For £2,000 you want to be getting at least 10 to 15 links. That gives people an idea of whether they’re actually getting good prices back or not. If you took that to a marketplace, you wouldn’t be able to do as much, because marketplaces are more expensive.

 

Are brands underinvesting in links overall?

It’s a problem with SEO in general. There are memes on LinkedIn comparing ad spend vs SEO spend — ad spend is a giant stack of money, SEO spend is pocket change on the table. With ads, once you know your cost per acquisition, you can just turn up the volume — you know what you’ll get for your spend. With SEO, people think it’s voodoo, black magic. You don’t really know what you’re getting, so they underinvest, at least initially, until they see some traction. Then they go for it.

Organic is still the best source of traffic. In the long term, it’s the cheapest channel, and the quality of FTDs you get is a lot better than anything else. Most SEO projects fail because they haven’t been given enough time — that’s from the client side, but also from the agency or freelancer side not communicating properly that this is a long-term project. It’s not going to happen overnight. And it’s only harder when people see instant results with PPC — they end up comparing “I ranked instantly with paid ads, but SEO has taken me six months.”

 

Are Google penalties still a risk if you build low-quality links?

I haven’t seen a penalty in a while, but it is still a thing. What I’ve seen recently is that reconsideration requests are a no-go — you can’t really do that anymore. I don’t know if that will change, but that’s the latest. iGaming is a different beast — Google seems to have different algorithms and approaches. Penalties seem to happen more to affiliates.

The reconsideration piece is a nightmare. It’s almost like you’ve been slapped once, and then you’re on the blacklist forever — you have to start from scratch. That’s quite scary. You could be an operator trusting an agency to do the work, and they might be using really shitty tactics — and then it’s your entire brand on the line.

When I started in the industry, disavow files were quite a big thing — everyone was tidying up their backlink profile. Nowadays it’s almost like you don’t really need to. We haven’t been focused on disavow for the past few years. You look at iGaming backlink profiles and you see the classic Telegram SEO anomaly links pointing to every single profile — I think those just get ignored by Google because it’s at such a large scale. The algorithm is trained to spot and ignore them. That said, negative SEO is still a thing, so it’s good to have disavow as an option — but most people don’t need to use it regularly. Something has to go seriously wrong to justify it.

 

How should you pace link building?

Spread it out. You don’t want to be doing it all at once because it could raise flags — you want to be as safe as possible. We do have clients who come to us and say “you can spend an extra £15k”, and we’d rather do it sustainably. If you don’t have viral traffic or something else happening to justify a sudden jump, you’re in riskier territory. You probably wouldn’t have an issue unless you were doing a crazy amount, but it’s better safe than sorry.

 

One link building mistake casino brands need to stop making?

Investing in the same quality and same type of links repeatedly. You’re pigeonholing yourself — going after traditional outreach and never looking at the tier-one links in newspapers and magazines. You hit a wall, you don’t get the results, and at that point you need to look at your link profile and work out what’s missing. It’s like a puzzle — the brands ranking above you have newspapers, magazines, all the types of links pointing into them. Look at your profile, see what’s missing, and plug the gap.

 

One tactic affiliates do better than operators?

Affiliates have more flexibility. With reviews and content in general, operators are quite restricted by the platform in what they can actually say. Affiliates can get away with more creative content, digital PR pitching, and they’re usually faster and more flexible compared to an operator that has to go through several managers for approval.

They can also pick up different types of links. They can get free links from the affiliate programs they sign up to — you could sign up to 20 different affiliate programs and ask for a link back from the program’s own site to your affiliate site. It’s a free link, and they’re usually relevant: the topical trust flow is going to be games, gambling. It’s a good one to go for. That said, operators have opportunities affiliates can’t go for either — it works both ways.

 

Would you go back into affiliate now?

Completely different ball game. I used to rank on page one in the UK for roulette and blackjack terms and I used to make really good money out of that. And it didn’t take a lot of effort. I was really lazy, actually — I’d sit in the flat I shared with a mate I was in a band with, and I’d work maybe half an hour to an hour a day once I was set up. All I was really doing was buying links, and I had the content outsourced. I did that for two years and saw a really good return. Then the first Google Penguin update hit, and that was the update that really killed it. Part-time link builder, part-time band member — I wish I’d been in it a little bit longer. I caught the end. Now it’s super competitive. If I was going into this space today, I’d probably look at a different market — maybe an emerging one — and not focus on the UK at all. It’s a mess. It’d be much cheaper to get into that kind of market, and you’d rank and get results faster.