bigpondlatest

Hello and welcome to The iGaming SEO Show. Dylan, nice to see you. Nice to see you, Ari. How’s it going? Good — busy. Mid-March already. I’ve just had a bit of time off so I’m back to it feeling fresh — kind of. I had a cold, but all good. Things are going well at Big Pond. We’ve been super busy over the past couple of months. January is always quite slow getting back into it, by mid-February it’s the same, and then it kicks in and you’re going again. We’ve been doing a lot of work for clients on the topic of today — brand protection in the iGaming space. It’s a very important thing to do, so let’s get into it.

 

What do we actually mean by brand protection in iGaming SEO?

Brand protection means protecting your brand against other websites — typically affiliates — coming into the space and taking your traffic. One of the biggest acquisition channels when you launch a brand, whether it’s a sportsbook or a casino, is affiliate marketing. It’s a way to quickly get traffic. You obviously pay for it — in commission, CPA, rev share, or tenancy — and there are several different models, but it’s a very effective way of actually launching your brand and getting traffic.

The issue is that a lot of brands, when they first launch, don’t have a link profile. They don’t have authority, they don’t rank well in Google, and they might only rank for a few of their own brand terms. It’s easier for an existing affiliate with authority to come into the space, create a page — usually heavier on the content side — and start ranking for your branded terms than it is for them to rank for non-brand terms. So you need to do as much as you can to protect those branded rankings.

 

Why is it such a big issue when affiliates outrank operators for brand terms?

Because you’re already paying out margin to affiliates — it could be 30% or more. And as an operator, you’ve got all these other expenses too. You’re essentially paying them to rank for your own branded terms, when they should ideally be introducing people who don’t know your brand to your casino. It’s an easy win for them, but for you, it’s wasted marketing budget — because that user would have come to you organically anyway. They already knew your brand name and searched for you. But the affiliate’s page can look like the official site, someone clicks in, and you’re paying them to get a lead you already had.

Affiliates run a page with a very clickbaity CTA, they get the clicks, they get the FTDs, and you’re essentially paying them for your own brand traffic. It’s a real problem, and we see it a lot with our clients.

Why do affiliates outrank operators so often?

It usually comes down to websites that have been live for years and have built up authority. It’s easy for them to put up a piece of content, and if you’re a newer brand that doesn’t have much of a profile online, they can appear on page one, top three, within a couple of days. The strength of their link profile is their competitive edge. Content is the other half of it — a lot of newer operator platforms are all JavaScript and difficult for Google to index, whereas affiliates are usually SEO-friendly by design and go very heavy on the content side.

 

What mistakes do operators keep making?

They don’t prepare in advance. You could easily prepare two or three months before launch. By the point you’re actually activating affiliates, you want a website that already has some traction. You can do that by having a welcome page with some content and information about what you’re launching, and starting your link building from that point — before affiliates are even activated. That way, when you get to launch day, you already have some profile in place, some links pointing back to the website, and a bit of history in Google to protect you from affiliates coming in and taking your traffic.

Building on that, another important planning step is thinking about your online footprint ahead of time. What do you want it to look like? You need to be on all the right sites, and that’s where the concept of entity SEO comes in — you want to create a clear, concise, identifiable online entity for your brand so Google and users can see you’re consistent across the internet, and that you’re the official one. That’s obviously really important when you want to show you’re the official site versus an affiliate.

Even if you don’t have a fully optimised site up yet, you can still start building social media profiles and putting the groundwork in, so that when your site is live you can instantly start promoting it, the socials are linked from your website, and it all kicks in. Social media channels and Trustpilot already have a lot of authority — go and build a profile there and you could be protecting a spot on page one. Thinking of your ideal SERP: your official site’s ranking top, and you’re dominating all the real estate with your social profiles.

 

What does it actually cost when an affiliate outranks you for your own brand?

It’s a lot of wasted marketing spend. Taxes are going up in a lot of countries, then you’re paying out 30% or more to affiliates, and there’s a long list of other things operators have to pay for on top. If you invest in TV ads or other channels that push your search volume up in Google and affiliates are coming in and taking that, you’re just paying twice for the same user. You’re getting more brand awareness — which is what you want — people search for you, and it’s the affiliate that comes up and sells the click back to you.

SEO is a longer-term strategy you want to do sustainably, so that you can eventually become equal to the affiliate sites in terms of link profile and then dominate your own brand.

 

How does this affect paid media and CPA?

It affects paid costs too. If you don’t control your organic footprint for the top results, you’re relying on paid search and paying Google Ads to protect your brand. If you plan in advance and invest probably a fraction of what you’d spend on Google Ads, you can protect that organically. Brand SEO isn’t as expensive as non-brand SEO — you’re not trying to rank for “casino”, you’re trying to rank for your own brand — so it’s pretty straightforward if you have a plan in place. It’s all about planning, and involving everyone in the decisions. Not doing stuff in silos. Making sure SEOs are on the same page as web developers. So much can go wrong when someone makes a small choice like editing a URL, and it screws up all your link building and internal linking. It’s high stakes for tiny errors.

You do get brands that get it right from the start, but a lot don’t. It comes down to decisions like picking the right platform, and speaking to your platform developers early, giving them your plan, and asking them to provide feedback on what they can do to make the whole process SEO-friendly. A good example: we’ve been doing this work for a new client and they went to their platform provider to ask if they could add a certain page — a reviews page — and the provider said no. But you need that page for SEO protection. You want to start protecting “brand name reviews” as a search term. If you’ve got nothing on your website that can rank for that, how can you protect it against affiliates creating reviews pages to capture that traffic? It’s important to work with your platform provider so they can do everything with SEO considered, rather than just saying no. They might be looking purely at UX, but there’s always a balance.

 

What should an operator’s ideal brand SERP look like?

Ideally you rank first, page one, for all your core brand terms, with site links so you take up a lot of page one real estate. Then you want things like Trustpilot ranking — it usually sits in second or third for brand terms. Ideally, you have good reviews there (a tricky one), and clicking through Trustpilot should lead back to your site. Then you’ve got social profiles ranking. If you’re a bigger brand, you could have a knowledge graph, and you could have AI overviews coming in too. You want to control as many assets as possible on page one. If affiliates want to snoop in and take traffic, you want them at least below the fifth or sixth result.

You also have to think about mobile — mobile real estate is a lot more shrunken down, so what actually fits at the very top matters. Google varies in how many results it shows per page. And in some cases you need to do this per country. An example we had earlier: a brand targeting several different countries but without the right international SEO setup. In that case we’re actually building micro sites in different languages to rank for branded terms. You want to secure the main domains per country, plus a few variations. It’s not going to cost a lot, but it’ll save you a lot of money long-term — because otherwise affiliates go and buy them. In some cases they don’t even drive the traffic back to you; they use your position and then send the traffic to another casino. Quite cheeky. It’s gambling — we’re working with what we’re working with.

 

Which core pages should every operator have for brand protection?

We have a brand protection audit we run. Off the top of my head: the homepage, a login/signup page (targeting “login”, “sign up”, “sign in” — big terms affiliates target, usually with a page showing screenshots and content explaining how to sign up), a reviews page, and then the different brand variations — brand + casino, brand + sportsbook, and country variations. Basically any variation of your brand plus something.

Then one of the really important ones: bonuses, promotions, casino welcome bonuses, cash back, anything to do with an offer. Affiliates do very well out of those terms. Another one is “legit” — is this casino legit? Is it safe? Those searches always come up, and even if you’re a new brand not getting volume for them now, you almost have to predict people will search for them in the future.

I remember an affiliate that used to rank second or third for multiple brands, titled something like “scam or not” — “is this casino a scam or not?” Very clickbaity. It worked really well, and I think it’s still going. So it’s not a scam — the affiliate is definitely not a scam, it’s a pretty good business model. Making someone rich.

 

How important are site links and internal linking architecture?

Super important for SEO in general, but especially for brand terms — if you can generate site links, you’re taking up two or three positions, and on mobile that’s enormous. You’re essentially protecting yourself very well. You achieve that with good structure, internal linking, and external links pointing to your key pages too.

External links can have a much better effect on certain parts of your website if your internal linking is right. If you’re creating content hubs or internally linking all the relevant pages together, links built to the folder have a better effect on all the pages underneath it. You could be pointing a lot of really good quality links to the root domain, but if your internal linking structure isn’t optimised, that equity isn’t trickling down to the deeper pages the right way. You’re just not getting the benefit.

What role do external links play in brand protection specifically?

Very important. Unless you’re in a market without many affiliates or you’re not really activating affiliates, then maybe not as critical — you can get away with a few links and rank for your brand. But if you are activating affiliates, you need to start investing in links ideally two to three months before launch, with a welcome page in place.

Links still absolutely move the needle. A lot of SEOs argue about how important links are, but they’re still vital for getting in there and staying there. And it’s the same with all these new search engines and LLMs — Gemini, the rest — they rely on backlinks too. That’s not going away.

Consider it as a digital footprint overall. Don’t just think of links as guest posts — think of links from all the right platforms and channels Google trusts: Web 2.0s, social channels, citation sites. A Wikipedia link is the gold standard — really hard to stick if you can get one. A lot of these links are free. It’s not so much raw SEO value — it’s that Google sees you, sees you’re listed on all these networks, and recognises you as a real brand. You tick a lot of boxes and take up positions on page one at the same time. Win-win.

What I say to new brands coming in — because it can be overwhelming when you tell them they need profiles on ten social sites, review sites, and citations — is we can just build out an initial profile so you have the presence. You don’t have to be active everywhere. That’s unrealistic. You might be active on one or two channels initially as a small team, or even as a big team. But if you have that initial profile ticking the boxes, down the line you can start becoming more active and plan a content strategy. And always link to your website and your socials — it’s easy to miss but it all filters through to your knowledge graph eventually.

Can operators realistically push affiliates down the SERP without starting a war?

Quite controversial, but yes — using the same methods. One thing we’ve seen recently, mainly from black hats, is parasite SEO — using Trustpilot, for example, to rank. Because it’s so effective and Trustpilot has a massive link profile, operators can do the same thing.

We’re doing this at the moment for a brand where, one or two months before they’d even launched, there were already parasite micro sites ranking for their own brand terms. The black hats had registered similar domains, built websites through tools like Claude (really simple AI-generated sites — which is crazy in itself), ranked them in positions one and two, and sent the traffic to rival casinos. So we’re actually doing the same for this client. We’re building up the main URL’s equity in Google through links and authority, but we’re also building a number of micro sites in a better way than what they’ve done — ranking them and pushing the black hats down.

You can do the same with socials, any site you can get a profile on, and as an extra — if you really want to push things down — you can start building links to those social profiles or Trustpilot pages and rank them even higher, displacing affiliates.

 

How do you prioritise brand protection against non-brand growth?

Always start with brand protection if you’re going heavy with affiliates. Then in the background you start building long-tail, finding a position in the market and a niche you can go in and own. Going in from day one and saying “we’re going to rank for sportsbook or sports betting” — it’s just not going to happen. You want to build that slowly. It also builds confidence: if you can drive growth through non-brand within the first year, you start building that channel and can justify bigger budgets and more link spend.

It’s about picking the right battles — something you can actually move the needle on, so the client buys in. Focus on a niche where you’ve spotted a gap you can own and build from there, unless you have a crazy budget (which a lot of people don’t).

 

Do operators need a separate link strategy for brand protection?

No — if you’re doing SEO, brand protection is part of the remit. You’ll take that off first and then move into non-brand. If you’re not planning on doing SEO, but you’re relying on affiliates, streamers, and people Googling your brand as your search volume grows, then yes — you do need a dedicated brand protection budget. It’s not going to be as expensive as a non-brand campaign, but you need something going in monthly. The more buzz you get around your brand, the more competition you’ll get for page one.

 

Should operators build links directly to brand pages?

Yes. Depending on the platform and the assets you have, you want to be protecting the core brand terms — brand + login, brand + review, brand + signup — and all the variations of subcategories like casino, live casino, roulette, blackjack, sportsbook, plus bonuses and cash back. If you don’t have branded pages in place for those, that’s something you need to build — otherwise someone will take the traffic.

 

Socials vs traditional SEO links — which carries more weight?

Both, everywhere. Everything Everywhere All At Once — that’s the answer. If you can. But as I said, you don’t need to be actively posting on every platform. It’s almost impossible for a new brand — you’re strapped for time, you’d need a team. You can have a plan where you build profiles on all the relevant sites, be active on one or two, and then focus your effort on link building. That gives you a nice balance.

 

What’s the fastest brand protection win you’ve seen?

One we’re doing right now. The main website hadn’t launched yet, and it was going to be heavy JavaScript — difficult for us to push changes through. So we built a micro site in plain HTML to rank and protect the brand before the main site even went live. It’s kind of crazy to be able to rank a plain HTML site like that, build links to it, and have an asset you can use forever. Smaller teams can move fast because you’re not running everything through layers of managers, building a case, and waiting for permission.

 

Should operators work with affiliates who are ranking for their brand?

You don’t want to annoy them too much if they’re also delivering non-brand traffic. You need guidelines in place — a lot of affiliate programs do. There’s a balance. In some cases there might not be a lot you can do, because the affiliate is also giving you good-converting non-brand traffic. In that case, brand protection is the job — don’t interfere too much with the affiliate, just indirectly push them down the SERP.

 

Is legal action or trademark enforcement ever worth it?

I’ve never been involved with that. It can take a while. I know black hats sometimes lodge DMCAs — that’s actually a black hat tactic too. Ideally I’d like to avoid legal routes and control things myself rather than going through a third party. It’s a last resort, and it also depends what country you’re in — trademark and copyright laws vary.

I’ve heard of situations with casinos ranking on page one for prominent terms where someone’s filed a DMCA, the site gets taken down, and by the time it’s back up they’ve lost a bunch of players — often at peak times. Very sneaky.

 

Can brand protection be overdone?

I don’t think so. Once you’re well protected, you can start investing into other things — but you still keep an eye on it with a rank tracker and maintain what you’ve built.

 

If an operator is losing brand SERPs right now, what’s step one?

Step one — get in touch with us. Kidding. You need to map out all the keywords and areas where you’re losing traffic to affiliates, then come up with a plan. Look at your technical side — make sure your website is actually indexed and found. Look at your content — are you missing key pages? And look at your links. Deal with it query by query: brand reviews, login, signup — have you got all those pages? Cover everything off, then build a plan for link equity and the other assets you need to protect against affiliates.

 

How long does proper brand protection SEO take?

Initially — when you haven’t activated affiliates yet — it can be quick. You could rank very well within a couple of weeks. The issue is when you activate affiliates and bigger sites with bigger profiles come into the space. At that point they might rank second with a better CTA than yours. I’d say invest in it for at least six to eight months to build up link equity, then evaluate and either renew or start investing in other areas.

 

One-off fix or ongoing strategy?

Ongoing strategy, especially if you’re growing and going into different markets. It’s ongoing until you reach a point where you have a decent enough link profile to protect you from affiliates outranking you. If you move into non-brand SEO after that, it just enhances the work and keeps building the profile. It used to be a one-off years ago — now there are too many sites that can outrank you on page one. You need it in place.

Good to catch up. We’ve got a few more episodes coming out soon with different guests to mix it up, so it’s not just the two of us. Thanks for tuning in — if you like the content, subscribe, it helps us grow the channel. It’s still in its infancy. Cheers.

Hello Nick, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. How’s it going? Good — it’s nice being down this neck of the woods, it’s been a long time. For the listeners, Nick was actually my first boss. He introduced me to SEO. When was that? 2008. Lifetimes ago — almost 20 years now. Giving away my age. We share a similar story when it comes to marketing, and I got into SEO because of you. You’ve been doing SEO and digital marketing, you’ve built startups, and now you’re running a really interesting project — so I thought it’d be a good conversation to get you down and talk about prediction markets.

 

It’s a new world, and it’s constantly changing. There are quite a few of these platforms coming out right now. Being in iGaming for so long, you kind of need a bit of disruption — something to refresh and shake things up. A comparable shake-up would be Google and social media to the newspaper industry. Newspapers held on, fought tooth and nail, and have essentially given up now — they know they can’t beat it. Casinos online — there you go. The betting industry is as old as humans really. We like to speculate, and from a technology point of view there have been some massive changes in the past 20 years. Blockchain technology — and I hate calling it blockchain technology, I feel like an old academic when I say it — but it’s incredibly disruptive across many industries. Betting and gambling, though I don’t necessarily see prediction markets exactly in that light, will definitely feel pressure from the crypto industry, because crypto was always going to move into most things in the end.

 

Quick backstory — how did you get from SEO to prediction markets?

Let me start at the marketing end. I did SEO for many years across loads of different industries — iGaming, hospitality, basically everything. This was back when there weren’t really niches. You worked for an agency, they brought work in, and you serviced whatever was out there. Then I broke out on my own and worked as a consultant, focusing mostly on app store optimisation and app marketing, which was really fun. I tend to get bored after about six to eight years doing the same thing — my attention drifts, “we’re just doing the same thing over and over.” So I broke out again. Coming to the end of my app marketing time was machine learning and AI. I did some intensive courses, learned to code, and had a YouTube channel called The Data Boy where I taught marketers that what’s happening right now was coming, and they’d better get their finger out or they’d be out of work.

 

Roughly the same time I started to really understand Bitcoin and was lucky enough to be living in London. Through a friend I got introduced to Coinscrum, which to this day is one of the oldest, longest-standing crypto events globally. All the OGs from crypto went through that door. Brian Armstrong — pretty much every name. People don’t understand this: the whole crypto movement was more or less in London, because of the finance industry and the technical talent. There are people who suggest the team behind Satoshi was in London at that time. Ethereum was launched in London — Vitalik and Gavin Wood actually met through Coinscrum. There’s a blue plaque on the wall now: “Ethereum launched here.” People don’t realise the UK was the hub, and the government killed it with regulation.

 

I got into crypto through that and through the right people — I was never really into the scammy stuff or pumping. We were looking to disrupt industries, make things fairer for people, and cheaper. If blockchains aren’t making life cheaper, I don’t know what we’re doing. So prediction markets ended up being a natural progression. Around 2019/2020 there were prediction markets in crypto before Polymarket — Augur was one of them, there’s another one whose name I can’t remember that claims to have been first. There’s a bit of beef between them — not heavy beef, not 90s rap beef, but “I was first online” beef. Then Polymarket came along, and Kalshi, who I think launched around 2019. Kalshi has all the rails of a traditional betting company. Polymarket has crypto rails — and there are things you can do because of that which you can’t do with a Web2 business.

 

How do prediction markets differ from traditional sports betting?
Putting on my crypto-ideology hat: betting is everywhere. Financial markets are betting. Buying property and renting it out and speculating on the price is betting. The first humans who planted seeds and waited for them to grow — that was a bet. Farmers bet every year. It’s everywhere.

 

Where I see prediction markets, particularly real crypto-native prediction markets — Kalshi in the US is trying to push into crypto, but I’ve yet to see anything materially comparable to Polymarket. When I look at Polymarket, I see a DeFi ecosystem sitting behind it. You get decentralised finance — you can lend, borrow, yield. I also see a data industry being built around it, and that’s important. There is no intrinsic value outside of the sports industry for sports data. You can’t use it to predict an outcome outside of sports. With prediction markets, you can.

 

So the way I see prediction markets right now: it’s the front-end “killer app” use case for crypto that crypto hasn’t really had. Crypto’s been around for years and nobody knows what the killer app is. For me, right now, the killer app is prediction markets. It’s a really easy way to onboard people into crypto rails and get them using cryptocurrencies instead of fiat. The fact that sports is the biggest category in all prediction markets has less to do with the technology and more to do with humans — sports betting is natural, particularly in the UK and Europe. There are bookies, it’s not taboo. In the US it’s incredibly taboo — I read comments on posts and people say things like “you are the devil, you will die.” There are some strange ideologies around someone speculating on their favourite team.

 

Can you give a real example of using prediction markets beyond sports?
Polymarket pushes this narrative more than anyone: we’re looking for data that helps us predict the world. Sports is just an easy onboarding tool. A perfect example: end of last summer I wasn’t sure which way Bank of England interest rates were going to move. There’s a market for this on Polymarket — interest rates have been on there for ages. It’s important to study interest rates if you have debt. I started getting letters from a bank saying “lock in your interest rate now because we know it’s going to get a bit shaky in the next couple of weeks.” There was a rate change coming, and I thought rates weren’t going up — I thought this was the banks trying to get us to lock in higher rates so they made more money. I went on Polymarket. It reflected what I believed, and it also reflected what other people I know who watch this stuff all the time were hinting at. And rates didn’t go up.

 

So I used that data to decide what to do with my mortgage. You can’t do that with a sportsbook. And it’s incredibly difficult to do with financial markets unless you’re a specialist — that takes years to understand. If I want to go to a single page that gives me the probability of what the crowd thinks is going to happen, I’m not going to find it on a sportsbook or a bank — I’m going to find it on a prediction market.

 

Then if you want to dig into the nitty-gritty: say I bought that position six months before the announcement. Because of crypto rails, I can borrow against that position, or hedge it. You can’t do that with sportsbooks. There’s a much bigger data play, a much more emerging financial toolset for everyday people.

 

What’s the regulatory picture for prediction markets right now?
It’s unknown at this point. People will say it’s absolutely gambling, but let me be very clear: if you’re running a crypto-rails business, we don’t hold your money and we don’t set your odds. The market sets the odds. The money is held in smart contracts and the platforms don’t care which way the market moves. Find me a sportsbook that says that. The sportsbook model is they set the price, they are the house.

 

Betting exchanges are the closest comparable to a prediction market — that’s a fair comparison. But betting exchanges don’t have any of the rails that make prediction markets useful outside of sports betting. They’re set up for betting, not for surfacing information, finding accurate prices, or hedging. Prediction markets can do all of those things, which makes them more valuable to different audiences.

 

Outside the US, prediction markets will probably be regulated through gambling commissions — until the point where that doesn’t fit anymore, because once your prediction market isn’t just sports but also cultural markets, geopolitics, and commodities, it sits flatly between financial markets and betting. We will need different regulatory frameworks. One emerging point is around insider trading, which people are very split on — should it be allowed as part of surfacing the truth and getting accurate prices, or suppressed because people may get injured?

 

How do you actually stop insider trading in a prediction market?
Do you want to stop it? That’s the question. If somebody at the council is privy to information before everyone else, and they don’t control the decision but they have early access, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that — because what we’re trying to find is efficient pricing. We’re trying to source accuracy. Truth is a tricky word — truth changes depending on the light in the room — so I prefer “accuracy.”

 

If you draw the comparison to media: any pundit can go on a news show and say whatever they like. There’s no cost to whether they’re right or wrong, and people might use that information and get it wrong. Whereas if you go to a prediction market first, or use one to validate what a pundit said, you’ll get closer to accuracy. People use the word “truth” — I don’t like it because it’s flexible. Accuracy isn’t flexible. You either buy at the right price and sell at a higher price, or you buy at the wrong price.

 

And that goes right down to the local level. If somebody’s pregnant and you and ten friends bet on whether it’s a boy or a girl — who’s getting hurt? Nobody’s being injured.

 

Tell us about Populace — how does it differ from Polymarket and Kalshi?
The big players right now are Kalshi and Polymarket, and they’re essentially centralised question-asking. Their communities can suggest markets, but in the end Kalshi and Polymarket have to manage their liquidity with liquidity partners, so they only create markets they think will draw a lot of volume. That’s totally fine — it makes commercial sense.

 

I come from the world of trying to decentralise everything because I think it’s fairer. If we think of markets as user-generated content — and we look at Instagram, Reddit, the early Huffington Post — what happens when we let anybody create a market? And by anybody, I don’t mean any market they like — we have controls in place so we don’t get abusive or racist markets. But what data pipelines do we get from “some guy in Glasgow” creating a market about something he knows a lot about? Take the Glasgow Central Station fire — when will it reopen? How much will it cost the city to rebuild? Glasgow City Council has to buy the plot and then £500 million on top. These are interesting, super-niche markets that won’t need huge volume but could have lots of trading activity within them. And again, if it’s built on DeFi rails: take a position now, lend against it, cash it in later. It’s a really interesting way of allowing people to speculate on their daily lives in a relatively safe way, because the only person you’re betting against is your counterparty.

 

How do you handle market resolution at scale?
Sports is dead easy — get a high-quality, trusted sports API and you can verify how a game resolved, how many red cards were given, all of that. Financial data, easy. Crypto data, easy. Where it becomes very, very difficult to do at scale is the resolution of cultural markets.

 

People may remember the Zelensky suit market on Polymarket — when he visited Trump and the question was “will he wear a suit?” To the general public he wore a suit. But there was nuance in the rules that allowed it to be resolved as “no, he didn’t wear a suit.” All sorts of arguments. This is happening on Polymarket quite a lot.

 

Rules are everything in prediction markets. Read the rules. If you don’t understand them, copy and paste them into a language model and get it to explain them to you like you’re a dummy, and find the gaps — because a lot of money is being made by people not interpreting the rules correctly. The devil is in the detail. Rules will get clearer over time as people with real understanding come in and say “in this circumstance, you’re not accounting for X, Y and Z.”

 

If you’re trying to scale resolutions that aren’t database- or data-driven, you can’t just plumb into a trusted API — you need to put it to consensus. Polymarket works on consensus through a protocol called UMA. Anybody can say “I think this market should resolve in X direction” — they put up a bounty (size depends on the market), and the community votes. The issue is this: if the value of the market resolving in one direction is greater than the cost of using your governance tokens to sway it, you’ll swing the market in that direction. That has happened on Polymarket. It’s a totally legal rug in some respects. So resolutions in decentralised prediction markets in Web3 are still an ongoing problem. We’re looking at this seriously and have ideas around validators to sign things off. It’s not just a fancier sportsbook — the technology stack is completely different. We have to decentralise everything to make it fair, allow it to scale, and make sure there’s a cost to abusing it.

 

What are the go-to marketing channels for prediction markets?
Because it’s crypto, you can’t really advertise — you can, but it’s a nightmare. Out of that constraint, the crypto KOL was born. Love it or hate it, it’s part of the beast.

So typically we’d be going with KOLs. There’s an SEO component too — technical needs to be sorted, and if you want to go head-to-head with a sportsbook you’ll need link building. But for go-to-market, we niche down into a specific region and work with KOLs who understand those local markets, the entertainment culture, what’s going on there. They can create markets around local musicians and local events.

 

To give an example of a big prediction market push: Kalshi, last year, during the “badge wars” on Twitter, when they and Polymarket had raised loads of money. They started handing out badges wholesale and Kalshi hired top crypto influencers into their team to bullpost it. It worked for a couple of months. Being a bit of a veteran, I knew it was a three-month max play — eventually people would get sick of the prediction market noise. Twitter formally announced they were downgrading prediction market content, and now X is essentially cooked for prediction market reach because the algorithm is weighted against it.

But this KOL movement is a crypto thing. If you’re looking for a job in crypto and you don’t know somebody who can vouch for you or have a big audience, you’re not getting a job — because crypto wants you to come on with a following and post out to it. Another example: last summer, Leo Trades and Alex Becker (the SEO guy) teamed up to launch a DEX — I think on Avalanche — with one of them as CEO. They bullposted that to the top of the DEX rankings within a week. We’re talking competing with Uniswap. Most trades were going through that platform, and that was basically just two KOLs with huge audiences. To bring it closer to gambling: Roobet — basically made into a giant by one big crypto streamer doing the same thing.

So if you can find the right partner and embed them in the company, they’re less likely to lose attention and move on. That’s the issue with KOLs — their attention. We’re looking at big tipsters and crypto KOLs. I don’t know how much difference there is between a tipster and a KOL — KOLs tend to bring more lifestyle content; tipsters are more “I’m on point with this.” For me it’s about performance: who drives the most users to us. The ones who really perform, we make our country head — they understand what’s happening on the ground.

This is really important. We did some pushes into countries, and as soon as we dialled in on local content the metrics went insane — engagement went from 3% to 45% on a tiny scrappy little campaign that we paid almost nothing for. That’s what I want more of. I want it to be local. I want it to mean something. I want people to get excited because it’s the music they listen to, the show they watch on TV at night. We saw a lot of Bad Bunny markets on Polymarket — let’s do that for non-English-speaking countries, where there are huge artists who don’t sing in English.

 

How important is community as a moat?
You could copy our tech — in crypto we tend to make everything open source. We won’t be immediately, but after a generation or two we’ll probably open-source the original product the way Uniswap did, so people can build DEXes off it. The only real moat any business ever has is its community.

If you treat them well — and this is internalised in me, this is what I want to see in my business — I want to enrich everybody who participates. That’s why we give 1% of trade fees to the KOL or anyone who creates a market. That’s why we’re looking at building yield into deposits, because with DeFi it’s Lego blocks — we plug in something like Aave so your $50 sitting in there earns yield. How do we give back? That’s a very different mentality from centralised anything. Centralised everything is about extraction. We’re about giving back. As long as we stay on side with our community, are fair, and are transparent, why would they leave?

I’ve seen people leave Polymarket for Kalshi, by the way, almost exclusively because of how Polymarket has handled certain resolutions. These are people who properly trade and generate fees on these platforms. Why wouldn’t you listen to them when they have problems? You can do all the marketing budget you want, get all the KOLs, but if you don’t treat your community right, they will leave. They’re your moat — they protect you from your competitor. It’s basically acquisition and retention. KOLs bring the top of the funnel; it’s up to us to make sure the people who arrive are happy and earning.

Comparison: in DeFi summer 2020, OpenSea launched, did huge volume, and then Rarible came along and slashed fees. You saw the death cross — OpenSea is still around but they were too expensive. If your prediction market community can go elsewhere and get the same markets and same liquidity for cheaper, you’ll have to lower your fees. You have to listen to community to build a good product.

 

Is SEO a core channel for prediction markets?
Not currently, but I don’t think SEO is ever not a core channel. It’s a natural discovery channel and the quality of leads you get when you rank for the right stuff with the right pages is undeniable. From my point of view it’s about brand visibility. To rank a market we run that’s directly comparable to a sportsbook market, we’d have to spend a great deal of money to compete until we’re a huge brand.

But there are loads of niche, long-tail prediction markets that sportsbooks don’t compete on at all — and that’s the bit I’m really interested in. We have the core fixtures and the core elections, but the fastest-growing market a couple of months ago was “mention markets” — things like, how many times will Donald Trump say “great” in a press conference? Pure speculation as entertainment. With a traditional platform, you couldn’t really touch that.

Resolutions on those are funny too — Trump was talking, and one of the trigger words was actually shouted by someone in the audience. So how do you resolve that, unless the rules say he has to say it explicitly? Lots of fun, interesting cultural moments come out of these. I’m calling them “culture markets” because we don’t really have another term for anything that isn’t a structured sport, commodity, or financial instrument. I see that being a huge area of growth. It’s long-tail — most won’t have huge volume — but it’ll start to source information we’re not used to. If you’re super geeky about Star Wars, you could create markets and there might be tens of thousands of people who’d trade them. Or what colour shoes Nike will release this year. Tastemakers are perfectly placed to create markets in their niche and earn from them, whether through trading or being paid for the market.

I just keep thinking of all the angles you can use for digital PR with this. You could do an entire category of prediction markets about SEO rankings of a brand. Every community, everything — that’s what makes it so magical.

Where do you think prediction markets go in the next five years?
It hasn’t really left the US yet. The way prediction markets are talked about in mainstream media — I was sent an article yesterday in The Guardian about a journalist in Israel being sent death threats by a market because they reported something. That’s not okay. But it’s also interesting because it does hold journalists accountable for accuracy. If you’re not accurate and you’re telling lies and the market knows it, you should get in trouble.

Realistically, the noise right now is a US story — there’s a proxy war between state-level and federal-level betting regulation. Populace is explicitly not interested in Europe or the US. We’re going into niche markets all over the world to see what gets built out from them.

Take last year’s wildfires in the US. There were loads of prediction markets around them. If you’re watching them and you believe they’re accurate, and your house is in the firing line, that’s a very good source of information — and you can use it as a hedge. If you can’t get insurance because you’re in a fire line, you can use prediction markets to hedge that.

There’s a narrative emerging in the US around hedging your health on prediction markets. Maybe somebody worked in a place with asbestos exposure and the insurance company won’t cover them because they think they’ll get cancer — but the person believes their actual risk is low. You could build a market around that and find a counterparty to take the bet. You can do it with property, you can do it with crops. If you’re a farmer in a region that’s experiencing dry weather and you can’t get crop insurance because the data says one thing, but you’re on the ground and you understand it differently, you can create a market and find someone willing to take the other side. Weather markets are huge — people make a lot of money from them, and now with language models anyone can pull in data and form a view, but the human on the ground may know something the model doesn’t.

This is why I talk about prediction markets as a financial instrument. That’s maybe five to ten years off, once we have proper resolution systems and regulatory frameworks. But there’s nothing structurally stopping us from going there. Sports and geopolitics are low-hanging fruit that everyone understands. Everything else needs more sophistication, but it’s understandable long-term.

Further down the line, regulation will absolutely shape what these markets are and aren’t allowed to do. Right now we’re in experimentation phase — gray, not fully understood. The US situation isn’t really relevant to anywhere else; that’s a state-vs-federal proxy war specific to America. In the UK and Europe we’re used to top-down regulation, so what you can do is sit down with regulators, share your ideas, and get feedback. Not talking to regulators is ridiculous — it shapes your product, helps with raising money, and helps you plan for the future. I see prediction markets moving into the financial-instrument and information-accuracy space, and that’s going to need a bridge between gambling regulation and financial regulation, or a brand new authority entirely. With crypto we already saw a totally new thing get squeezed under financial-instrument rules, and the UK has been one of the worst places in the world to run a crypto business as a result. Regulators need to start seeing the world from a technology point of view — because with blockchain you can give them transparency they can’t get anywhere else, real-time access to every transaction, automated guard rails that don’t exist in centralised businesses.

 

Is this just betting with extra steps?
I like to look at it as kind of hyper-capitalism. If everything has a cost and you’re trying to maximise the return on that cost, you’re going to do your best not to take the wrong position. The Guardian article situation — who knows where a bomb is going to land. They were all working on probability and turned out to be wrong, somebody saw a bomb land somewhere, and that threw the market into disarray. So I see two layers: speculation as entertainment with the right controls to keep people safe, and robust financial instruments that everyday people can use to hedge against their actual life circumstances — provided you can resolve the market accurately.

 

Where can people find Populace?
We’re on mainnet on Base — Coinbase’s blockchain. We have a contract set up so as soon as you create an account, you get fake tokens airdropped automatically and we cover the gas fees, so you can go in there and play with the product without any cost. We jokingly called it USDP instead of USDC. Just go to the site and arrive. You don’t need to be crypto-native — we’ve not built this for crypto-natives. If you have a wallet you can sign up that way, but if you only have a phone number, email, or Telegram, you can sign up with that too. The experience will be slightly different from a sportsbook because you have to sign wallet transactions, but if you’ve never used crypto before, this is the one to use — I guarantee you’ll be able to.

We’re raising right now. We’re doing our pre-seed and we have our go-to-market strategy, which I’ll not share here in case someone front-runs me, but we’re confident — the right people are in the right place. If you’re interested in investing in prediction markets and you come to us, you’re early.

 

Nick, awesome — nice to have you. We’re seeing all these new markets actually come out, and it’d be really interesting to work for one at some point. I keep thinking about all the angles you could use, and you can see this becoming massive — to the point that it could dwarf a traditional sportsbook or casino in terms of rankings and the sheer number of active pages. It’s a really exciting concept. Yeah — it was great coming down. Thanks a lot.

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.

Hello and welcome to the I game and SEO show. This is episode 3 and today we decided to change things up a little bit.

Just to get away from just myself talking about SEO and my team and I’ve got a guest with me, Timothy Malmush Ganache. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, pleasure. Good to see you. Just to give a bit of a background, I’ve been following Timothy on LinkedIn for a few months now. The algo, one of the posts came up on my algorithm and it was about black hat SEO and parasites and canonicals and I thought this guy is quite interesting. I’m going to follow him and then over the course of the next few months there was quite a lot of in-depth posts about i gaming and blackhat SEO in general. So, I decided Timothy would be a great guest to actually get on the show. Maybe pick his mind a wee bit and get some ideas about what’s working, what’s not, and why Google seems to be broken, I guess.

So Timothy, over to you. Maybe if you could give us a quick introduction about yourself, your background.

Yeah, sure. I started in iGaming in 2005 actually right out of high school back in Israel. I started as a casino support — casino, bingo, poker — and then I got promoted to become an affiliate manager.

This is like, 2006 I get promoted. 2007–08 I decide to quit. I’m going to try starting my own thing. If it doesn’t work, I’ll go back to school. It did work. Sold my network of sites to Gaming Innovation Group back in 200… is it 16? Man, it’s a long time ago. And joined them as director of SEO and I was like employee five or six and it grew to like I swear 800 people.

Wow.

And it got a little too politically correct for me. So I like the startup feel and so I quit, started my own thing and then had some kids and back in November before then even 2024 I decided okay I need a break from this. But I get restless, I get bored so I write some articles because it’s still intriguing and if you want to stay in SEO you have to keep updated or it’s really hard to get back into it.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s really helpful.

Do you think Google’s state at the moment seems to be broken for certain SERPs?

Yeah, it does change over time. But I feel obviously you’ve been in the game for a long time, same as me. You do see a lot of things like history keeps repeating itself when it comes to certain tactics. Google changes some things and sites tank and get deranked and then they’re all at something else.

I feel like at the moment they’re too distracted by the AI race to actually pay attention to the basics and a lot of black hat tactics are actually getting away with murder at the moment.

Yeah. This is old school stuff. It’s like Google has devolved trying to automate everything and their AI is not keeping up. That’s how it feels. Why would parasites work now when it stopped working like 10 years ago?

The same with canonicals and stuff — that was never as effective as it is today.

Exactly. So I guess we agree on this point that Google’s state at the moment seems to be broken for certain SERPs, especially when it comes to casino, sportsbooks and all the competitive ones.

Yeah. I haven’t seen this at the same scale in other markets.

Do you think black hat websites are sticking longer at the moment or is it churn and burn?

It’s churn and burn. Basically you have the drop domain first of all, if that’s strong enough — and I’ve tested a few myself — and it seems to be some sort of random thing to it I haven’t cracked yet.

If you snap 100 domains, maybe eight will work. Once you have that core domain, now you can spam it up. I’ve written about that in my post to make it an authority based on the backlinks.

Then you use a canonical. The original domain is burned completely and by using a canonical there seems to be a delay in Google which lifts all penalties. So the new domain gains immediate authority and rankings like a fresh domain — but that will die too — and then you just canonical a new domain and the cycle continues.

So while it is churn and burn, it’s still long-term as long as you have that core domain.

How much do you think they’re actually spending to run this kind of operation?

Not that much. You can snap a really strong domain name for $10,000 and say you buy 100 and only eight work — you make your money back because you get those top positions.

Especially in black markets where the commission rates are insane. It’s worth it.

And it’s a shortcut. You don’t know if there’s going to be any black markets in four years if you do traditional SEO. This is way faster and easier and Google does nothing about it yet.

Do you think recent Google updates are actually doing anything?

The parasite stuff started popping up and Google gave everyone a warning — six months — it’ll be gone. Nothing happened. They just got stronger.

But now lately I’m seeing big parasites dying slowly. Video game sites and stuff getting erased from their highs. So maybe yes — I think the latest updates have done something. Canonicals are still strong though. There’s always a delay with Google.

What are the main tactics working right now?

Expired domains. That’s the only tactic. If you want to compete, you can’t start a fresh affiliate site. You don’t have a chance.

You could invest heavily in links but we’re talking multi-million compared to just snapping a domain and using the canonical trick. It’s much cheaper.

Why do some domains work and others don’t?

I haven’t cracked that yet.

It has to do with the domain and links and authority. Some old companies work really well, but not all.

You launch 10 or 20 and only a few stick. It’s strange. Maybe random chance or something missing.

Do you think CTR manipulation is being used?

Yes, 100%.

CTR manipulation works. Lowering bounce rate, increasing time on site — these things can influence rankings.

There’s also traffic bursts from platforms like Twitter/X that work for a short time.

But again, not every site benefits.

How can brands in regulated markets compete against this?

Make it more appealing to play on regulated markets.

That means removing friction, improving experience — but it reduces margins. Taxes hurt.

The other option is regulation changes, but that takes years.

There’s no simple solution to stopping black markets.

From an SEO perspective, what should legitimate brands be doing?

Branding.

Real branding. You can fake metrics, but you can’t fake real brand demand.

Direct traffic, brand searches — that’s powerful.

But it’s expensive, especially in high-tax markets.

Do links still matter?

Yes. It’s all links.

Content doesn’t matter like it used to. AI has made content easy.

Google has to rely on links because everything else can be gamed.

At the end of the day, it’s a popularity contest.

Should brands consider black hat tactics?

No. If you’re building a brand, you don’t want to burn it.

Black hat works short term, but long term it goes from 100 to zero.

Do spam links and negative SEO still work?

They can.

You can get a temporary boost until Google evaluates them, then it can hurt you.

Better to disavow — better safe than sorry.

Is it becoming easier or harder to compete in tier one markets?

Much harder.

Unless you’re doing black hat, or you’re an established brand, or you have an old authority domain — it’s very difficult.

Final question — are you working on any experiments at the moment?

No. I have kids, so this is more of a hobby now.

I write posts to stay relevant and keep learning. If I didn’t, I’d get bored.

Any SEO copies competitors — that’s how you learn — and I just share what I find.

Closing

It’s been really interesting having you on and hearing your opinion on everything that’s going on at the moment when it comes to Google and black hat SEO.

Thanks a lot for joining.

No worries.

We’ll include a link to your LinkedIn if anyone wants to follow.

Do you have anything else to plug?

No, nothing I can think of.

Awesome. Thanks a lot.

Cheers.

Hi everyone, welcome to episode two of the iGaming SEO show. My name’s Alan, I’m the SEO Manager at Big Pond Digital, and I’m joined today by Ari Purnas.

 

How are you doing?
Good — new year, good Christmas break. Had a good two weeks relaxing, not doing much. Checked a few emails in between, as tempting as that always is. But back to it. Ready to go. A full new year of iGaming.

 

Setting the scene for 2025
I always love chatting to you about iGaming specifically because you’re experienced in it and you’ve been in the game for a long time. There’s so much to talk about right now — not just in iGaming but in SEO in general. The buzzword is obviously AI, and just how big an influence it’s having. I’ve been doing this for 18 years and it’s constantly changing, but the last year had a lot packed into it. Loads to unwrap over the next few episodes.

 

Is the cost of entry going up for iGaming?
Now that we’re in a new year, it seems fitting to look at things a bit broader — overall trends, entry points, lesser-known brands trying to get in and grow their visibility. My first question is: do you feel like the fundamentals of SEO are actually changing, or is the cost of entry just going up?
The cost of entry for iGaming is definitely going up. It’s just becoming more and more competitive year on year. I remember back in 2011 doing affiliate marketing — to rank on page one for competitive terms like roulette and blackjack, the investment wasn’t that much at all. You needed an exact match domain, a decent content strategy, and a bit of link spend. I think I put something like four or five grand into one affiliate site in total and it was generating six figures. Those days are over, sadly.
But there are other ways in if you get creative — if you focus on a niche, if you have a unique selling point, a specific tool, or a community you can build around. The landscape has changed and you need to adapt.
In terms of the fundamentals, the core things are still the same: technical SEO, good content, links. What’s changed is there’s an added layer on top of that with AI. It’s not entirely new ground, but there are things we used to do that now need more emphasis and attention. The basics remain, but the landscape is different.

 

Does AI make things easier or harder for smaller brands?
It’s a mixed bag — a bit of both. It makes it easier to automate things that used to take up a lot of admin time, which is a big deal for smaller teams with limited resource. But at the same time, it means things get saturated faster. Websites are popping up everywhere, people are pumping out content at scale, and just because you can automate something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or that it’s actually going to work.

 

It’s about using those AI tools to your advantage and being creative with them. And in iGaming specifically, trust signals are huge — people forget that. You’re talking about people’s money. Google is going to be strict on that. Money or your life, I think that’s what they refer to it as. So getting your trust signals nailed and your content right is more important than ever.

 

It’s a congested space

 

It’s such a congested space for smaller brands trying to rank. You’re not just competing against other operators — you’re up against affiliates, bigger brands, black hat sites, regulatory constraints, licensing. It’s a combination of everything.

 

And for a lot of keywords, affiliates actually outrank operators. That must make it particularly difficult for new entrants. It is difficult. Most operators when they launch focus on getting traffic through affiliates — negotiating tenancy deals to get listed on sites that already have the audience. But what a lot of them neglect while they’re building that affiliate channel is their own SEO. It becomes very easy for an affiliate with a strong link profile to outrank you even for your own brand terms, never mind something highly competitive like “online casino.” They can just swoop in and rank second with a compelling CTA, and it’s relatively straightforward for them to do that.

 

Have backlink prices risen overall?
Overall, yes. I remember a few years ago doing our own outreach and finding webmasters who didn’t really know the true value of their site. That’s changed — webmasters now understand what links are worth. A lot of them also have deals with networks and middlemen that push prices up further. We tend to go direct, but the prices have still increased because people understand how much operators and affiliates actually make. You do occasionally get someone come back with a figure like seven grand for a single link, which is a hard no — they’re just throwing it out there — but someone must be paying it because they keep sending those emails.

 

Going back to around 2010 or 2011, when I worked in-house as an SEO manager for a casino, you could get links for as cheap as $20. We used to measure things by PageRank back then. The brand I was working for had a £10k monthly budget for tech, content, and links combined, and I’d struggle to spend it — because at $20 a link, that’s an effectively infinite pool of spend. Some of the higher tier links were obviously more expensive, but there were opportunities everywhere.

 

That was also when I first got the bug for affiliate marketing. I sat across from an affiliate manager who was also my boss, and he’d casually mention what some of these affiliates were pulling in. There was one guy with about 10 or 15 websites that looked like they were built in the nineties — heavy on content, entire link profiles made up of directory links bought from services like Directory Maximiser. The commissions we were paying him were around £100k a month across 15 brands. The websites were basically dead by then, just accumulating players over time. The guy was in his thirties and retired. That was the lightbulb moment for me.

 

Black hat sites are back
What actually surprises me is that black hat sites are back in the SERPs. There was a period where you didn’t really see them much, but over the past year or so they’ve crept back. A lot of it is expired domains — sites that used to be car websites or charity sites, with strong authority built up over years. Someone buys the domain, repurposes it into a black hat affiliate site, builds links to it, and ranks. I’ve seen people spending £40,000 or £50,000 on these domains. What’s strange is they’ll spend that kind of money and then put almost no effort into the UX — the sites look terrible. But the average user isn’t thinking about that. They’re just searching, they come across it, they click it. And apparently it’s working, because they keep showing up.

 

The algorithm feels like it’s a bit of a mess at the moment. It’s history repeating itself — patterns you’d typically associate with ten years ago are back. The SERPs are volatile. In iGaming specifically, because it’s so competitive, you’ve got black hats pushing, brands pushing, sites getting removed, DMCA actions, DDoS attacks — it’s constantly moving, especially at the top end of the keyword landscape.

 

Content strategy for operators
What would your advice be to a newer operator wanting to rank through content?

 

For an operator, you’re a bit more restricted than an affiliate, but you can still carve a niche. If your main focus is live casino, for example, you could produce content around live dealer experiences, introduce the dealers, cover the studio — there are loads of angles. But before any of that, the basics need to be right, and that’s something I see multiple brands failing at.

 

A lot of operator sites are primarily client-side rendered, which means when Google crawls them, it doesn’t see much. There’s a crucial crossover between tech SEO and content that operators especially need to get right — making sure Google can actually see and index your content in the first place. Get that sorted first, then focus on building unique content with a clear angle. And I wouldn’t go chasing quick wins by scaling AI content at volume. That’s not a sustainable approach.

 

You have to be realistic as a newcomer. You’re not going to rank for “online casino” or “slots” straight away — it’s just not going to happen. You need to look at what niche you can go hard into. Game providers are a good example. You could pick someone like Pragmatic Play — one of the biggest names in the space — and write in depth about the history of the company, what makes their games unique, why players trust them. It’s about picking the right battles.

 

One thing that’s actually worked well for us is slot game descriptions, served in a format that AI systems can pick up too — structured with schema so it’s easy for engines to interpret. We also found that writing a piece like “five Pragmatic Play slots paying out big in Canada” — something with a real hook — performed far better than expected. It’s now one of our top ten most clicked pages. And the great thing about casino content compared to sportsbook content is it’s evergreen. Sportsbook is time-sensitive — you’ve got a window. Casino content you can write it, let it do its job, and it keeps working.

 

Picking the right battles and gap analysis
The biggest mistake we made early on was going almost exclusively after slots content. There were benefits — we rank pretty well for slot terms now — but you really need to cover the full picture. We’re now writing more about blackjack, roulette, poker. The volume isn’t as high as slots, but it’s important for backing up the overall topical authority. It shows Google you offer everything.

 

In terms of gap analysis, it’s about analysing the volume in your specific market, then looking at who ranks for the gaps you want to target and what their link profile looks like. If you find an opening that looks relatively uncontested, go for it and see how you perform. When new brands come to us wanting to rank for “online casino” with five backlinks, competing against sites that have had 10,000 links for the past 15 years, the first job is just setting realistic expectations.

 

Algorithm updates in iGaming
Do iGaming sites get hit harder by Google updates than other industries?

 

The SERPs are tracked daily and the changes are constant. In iGaming, because it’s so competitive, even a standard update can create big swings. Usually when you hear about an update, you log into your rank tracker and your Search Console and it’s panic stations. The last update was actually a nice change — all our clients got a bump, which felt like a reward for doing the right things consistently over the previous months. But it can always go the other way.

 

AI overviews and entity building
How much should website owners care about AI overviews and targeting AI answers?

 

Compared to a few years ago, when you could get away with a faceless website with no social presence and no listings elsewhere, it’s now much more about building a real brand. Google and other engines need signals to actually interpret authority — so you need listings on relevant sites, a knowledge panel if you can achieve it, social channels set up properly, Reddit presence, Trustpilot. There’s a checklist of things you need to tick to demonstrate that you’re building a brand and not just another site.

 

For FAQs and structured answers, the approach is similar to what worked in the past — tools like AlsoAsked are still useful for building topical authority. The SERPs change quickly though. Things that felt essential a year ago can shift in importance rapidly. It comes back to building a brand rather than just a website.

 

Do you think people underestimate the entity side of things — building presence off their own site?
Yes, definitely. People immediately default to thinking about what’s on their site and what links they’re building to it. The off-site brand-building piece is still underestimated by a lot of people in the space.

Hi, welcome to the first Big Pond Digital podcast. We are an SEO agency based in Scotland with a global client base, and we’re starting this podcast to share our experiences in the space.

 

I’m Dylan, SEO Manager at Big Pond Digital since 2020, and today I’m speaking with Ari, the founder of the company.

 

Ari, do you want to introduce yourself?
Yeah, hi, I’m Ari, founder of Big Pond Digital. I’ve been involved in SEO since 2008, so quite a long time, and I’ve been running Big Pond since 2018.

 

What makes iGaming SEO different from traditional SEO?
iGaming is simply super competitive compared to other industries. You get a lot of industries that fall into a certain group — pharma, adult, gambling, finance — all the grey areas that are super competitive. The SEO tactics are slightly different too.

 

How did Big Pond start in the iGaming space?
Big Pond was formed by accident, really. It was never my intention to run an agency. I started out as an affiliate, running a website that did really well. Off the back of that I built a few more affiliate sites, started going to conferences, meeting people, and got a few of them asking if I could do their SEO. Started with one, then got another, and it just naturally evolved into what it is today. I had to hire staff, do all the boring business stuff that nobody wants to do — but here we are, a few years on, still going strong and growing.

 

What are the biggest misconceptions people have about SEO in the gambling industry?
I think a lot of people are afraid of it. When I started out in SEO I was working in the fashion industry, lost my job and applied for a role in the gambling space mainly because I wanted a challenge. A lot of people don’t touch it because they think there are dodgy tactics involved — and obviously there’s some of that — but you actually learn a lot too. The gambling space is full of innovators. The tactics we’re using today will filter down to other industries a year or so down the line. That’s why I’m passionate about it. I never had an interest in gambling itself, but I love the industry because it’s competitive, cutting edge, and ahead of the curve.

 

What does the SERP actually look like for a casino or sportsbook in 2025?
The search results are quite mixed. AI overviews are taking up a big chunk of the real estate. PPC ads are everywhere — yesterday I was looking at my phone and I genuinely couldn’t distinguish between the ads and the organic results. There’s a lot less space to compete in compared to years ago when most people searched on desktop. Now it’s mobile, ads, AI overviews — you need to scroll past all of that before you even find an organic result. It’s a lot noisier and a lot harder to break through.

 

Are operators at a natural disadvantage?
I think anybody entering the gambling space right now trying to compete online is at a natural disadvantage, especially with a fresh domain. Unless you have very deep pockets — and even then, you’re not going to compete straight away. You’re playing catch-up essentially.
That said, there are still opportunities in certain countries and sub-niches. If you go more specific — crypto gambling, for example — you can grow faster than if you’re targeting something like “online casino” in the UK. I’ve had conversations in the last year where brands have come to us with those ambitions and our answer has basically been: you’re going to need £400k and come back to me in two years.

 

How do regulations and compliance impact SEO strategy?
The UK is particularly tough right now. It’s super strict, very competitive, and there’s not a lot of room to manoeuvre even for established brands. It’s a good thing in many ways, but it is restrictive. For other countries, different laws apply, so you really need to research the regulatory landscape thoroughly before deciding which market to focus on.

 

What goes into ranking for high-volume, high-intent terms?
A lot of patience, first and foremost. You need CMOs who actually understand the industry and how long SEO takes — and the investment it requires. Good communication between the agency and in-house SEOs is key. Beyond that, you need solid technical foundations, content, and links all working together. UX matters too, as do things like virality and traffic from other channels. Conversion rates, traffic signals — they all feed into each other.

 

How much of it is links versus on-page?
Links are a huge part of what we do in iGaming. Once you take good content and solid on-page SEO off the table, what’s left is links. You need a good profile — and it gets very competitive even approaching page one for the big terms. There are tier two links, refreshing old links — a lot goes into it.

 

What are the brutal realities people don’t want to hear?
It’s a tough sell. When you go to a new brand and say “give us a bunch of money and it’s going to be a year and a half to two years before you see real traction” — that’s a difficult conversation. So we try to ease clients in, but be honest and realistic from day one. How long does it actually take? It depends on the country and the competition. In the UK, a very long time — especially for a new brand. In a more open market, maybe a year. But it always takes time.

 

What does the link profile of a top iGaming site look like?
Usually it’s a blend. As a brand — or even as an affiliate — you need to be seen as a brand. That means having a presence on social media, bookmarks, review sites, citations, mentions in newspapers, Reddit threads, forums. Then on top of that, the super relevant, high trust flow, topically relevant links. A site that’s ranking well has a strong overall digital footprint — not just the links you’d typically build day to day, but everything a legitimate big brand would naturally have.

 

Why is link building so expensive in this niche?
It’s expensive everywhere, but iGaming specifically is in a different league. A lot of mainstream publications still won’t link to gambling sites. Because of the nature of the industry, websites have actually popped up specifically to link to operators — and webmasters know how lucrative casino traffic is. They know their worth and they price accordingly. Our job as an agency is to negotiate that down as much as possible, but a lot of them won’t budge — they get so much outreach that they can afford to ignore negotiation entirely.

 

In a market like Finland, for example, we had to acquire Finnish-language links and they were three or four times the price of a standard link. You could barely negotiate. So sometimes you compensate by going after cheaper .com links to bulk out a profile, then investing in the specific country-level TLD that will actually move the needle.

 

What separates a high-quality link from a useless one?
A lot of SEOs chase metrics blindly — and you need to remember those metrics come from third-party tools. The first two things I look at are traffic and relevancy. Does the site you want to buy a link from actually have traffic? Is it relevant to your brand? Is the placement going to fit naturally? If you can answer yes to those, you’re off to a good start. After that, look at trust flow, topical trust flow, and work through a checklist if you’re buying at scale.
You also need to keep an eye out for sites where traffic has clearly been pumped in artificially — you can see it in the data, a sharp spike then a crash. And there’s a sniff test too. If a site covers Jenna Ortega’s net worth alongside vitamin advice for elderly people and the latest casino bonuses, it covers everything under the sun. The broader it is, the less topical relevance it has. You can tell straight away.

 

Have you ever seen a site tank because of bad links?
My own site tanked because of bad links, back in 2012. I was at a conference negotiating a deal when the affiliate manager I was speaking to mentioned, almost in passing, that my rankings had just collapsed — apparently they tracked my rankings hourly. I hadn’t checked in a day because I’d been out the night before. I went back to the hotel and sure enough, I was nowhere to be seen. I managed to recover the site fairly quickly, but it was around the time of the first Google Penguin update, which put a lot of businesses out of business. The site had been built on pretty much pure black-hat links — minimal budget, exact match domain, thin content — and it had ranked well for about a year before it all came crashing down. There were probably 50 similar sites that tanked the same day.

 

You do learn a lot from it though. That’s when I actually started figuring out how to build something sustainable — not just rank and tank.

 

If you had £10k to spend on links as a new brand, how would you allocate it?
First, go after all the free links you can get — social profiles, bookmarks, Web 2.0s, citations, any relevant mentions on social networks. Get all of those in place first. Then when it comes to spending the budget, initially focus on building authority to the homepage rather than going deeper into the site. I’d say at least the first six to eight months should be about building that homepage authority, then start diversifying into deeper pages.

 

What technical issues do you see most often on iGaming sites?
Migrations gone wrong — by a mile. When brands re-platform and don’t have the right planning in place, a lot can go wrong. If SEO is a major traffic driver, you absolutely need a migration plan. That’s where I see most mistakes.

 

How does site structure impact rankings for competitive terms?
Massively. Everything from picking the right domain to planning the right architecture plays a big role, especially early on when you’re building your brand. If you’re targeting multiple markets, international SEO needs to be sorted from day one — folders, hreflang, everything. What usually happens is brands launch, then go back and try to retrofit it all. It’s far better to have your SEO team involved from the very start. It saves time, money, and a lot of platform tickets that might take six months to get actioned.
Changing a URL without proper planning can wipe out links you’ve built to that page and break all your internal linking in one go. It’s like cutting a thread in a web — it creates a chain reaction. Having everything mapped out in a spreadsheet, knowing where everything lives, having tools to monitor it — that’s how you mitigate the risk.

 

Do things like schema, page speed, and Core Web Vitals still matter in iGaming?
Absolutely. If you’re spending serious money driving traffic to your site, you want to make sure it loads fast and that the UX is good enough for people to actually convert. Schema helps with search visibility across all engines, including the newer ones emerging right now. And clickstream data is increasingly a factor — if your site is slow or your UX is poor, you get fewer clicks, your rankings drop, and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
Traffic from other sources is also a ranking signal now. If something goes viral within the industry — even just within that community, not millions of hits — search engines tend to reward it. That wasn’t a priority a few years ago. Now it is.

 

Can you walk us through an example of a site you turned around?
One case involved a migration that had gone wrong — the client came to us months after the fact. We did a full audit: technical, content, links, everything. All the signals pointed back to the week of the migration. It was a significant client with a big backlink budget, and when we dug into it, the issue came down to key pages that had been ranking for high-value terms having large amounts of content removed when the new site went live.

 

You can get everything technically right in a migration and still cause major damage by removing or changing content. The lesson is: know exactly where you are before the migration, have everything tracked and mapped, and do a full before-and-after comparison to make sure nothing’s been missed. In this case, the damage had been done for six months before anyone realised what had happened.