Gambling is one of the few verticals where a link programme can be simultaneously effective and terminal. Bulk marketplaces and expired-domain networks work well enough to look like a strategy for eight or nine months. Then one update takes three years of compounding with it in a weekend. This is what we do instead, and what we refuse.
What we refuse
- Bulk marketplaces. The same few thousand domains sell to every gambling site on earth. The footprint is visible to anyone with a backlink tool, which includes the search engine.
- Expired-domain networks. Cheap, fast, and the single most common reason a casino affiliate site loses 60% of its traffic overnight.
- Anchor-text ratios no natural profile has. If 40% of your anchors are “best online casino”, the profile is telling on itself.
- Velocity that looks like a budget. Two hundred links in month one, zero in month four. Real brands grow in a curve, not a step.
The refusal is commercial. A recovery from a link-based penalty costs more than the links ever saved, and the traffic that comes back is smaller than the traffic that left.
What we do
Digital PR around data
Benchmarks, surveys, payment-method maps, regulatory explainers. Gambling publishers, fintech press and local sports media link to numbers; they do not link to bonus pages. One data piece per quarter, promoted properly, outperforms fifty marketplace links.
Industry publications
Trade press, conference write-ups, podcast appearances, regulator-adjacent commentary. Slow, unglamorous, and exactly what a manual reviewer expects to see on a legitimate operator or affiliate.
Partnerships with a reason to exist
Payment providers, game studios, responsible-gambling organisations, local sports clubs where the licence allows. Each link sits inside content that would make sense without the link.
Reclaiming what you already earned
Unlinked brand mentions, broken links to old URLs, partners who moved pages. Usually the fastest month of the programme and the most ignored.
How to know it is working
- Referring domains grow at roughly the rate your content output grows.
- Anchor text is dominated by brand and URL, not commercial phrases.
- Core updates are flat or positive. Three in a row is the point at which we stop calling it luck.
- Traffic value, not positions, is the number in the monthly report.
What to do on Monday
- Export your backlink profile and sort by referring domain. Anything you would not want a reviewer to see, put on the disavow list.
- Pick one data piece you could publish this quarter with numbers only you have.
- Set a link-velocity ceiling tied to publishing velocity and hold the team to it.