It turns out doing the opposite of Google’s best practices of search engine optimization has resulted in gambling affiliate websites ranking higher.

With SEO evolving over the years, the race to capture internet traffic is significantly contrasting to the earlier days of the internet, and companies have begun to take advantage. 

The latest episode of the iGaming Daily Podcast sees SEO expert Ivana Flynn speak with Daniel Lux, consultant and founder of Linxact.com, to discuss the realities of modern SEO.

A combination of different approaches, including White Hat and Black Hat SEO, bring different outcomes, with the latter more likely to bring short-term results – but Google is contradictory with its rulings.

Lux said: “That guest post backlinks that are bought by many companies are considered as White Hat, even though Google says White Hat is completely organic, most White Hat  campaigns are not organic.”

Flynn then added to that point: “The point here is Google is broken. If you want to take advantage of it, you absolutely should, just don’t think it’s going to be long-term.”

How one website took advantage of Google

Flynn went on to explain how one website managed to take advantage of Google by utilising backlinks by reviving an expired domain. 

“One website is currently absolutely killing it for online casino and online poker in Australia in position one. That was previously some technical website. 

“They just bought it, built an affiliate website with almost no content and in the last few months with almost 4,000 links and most of them are redirected expired domains with amazing backlink profile, cross-domain canonicals, canonicals within their website. 

“The SEO practices there are fantastic, the people doing this know what they’re doing. It’s just the exact opposite of what Google said that you should do.”

Speaking on the future of SEO, Lux claimed that SEO will never be dead, despite the loopholes that most are taking advantage of. 

Lux said: “Google is broken and I think ChatGPT is broken because those systems are so complex that they cannot create full SEO safety for them, there’s always a loophole. SEO will never be dead.”