iGaming Daily

Hello everyone and welcome to yet another episode
of SBC iGaming Daily podcast, the Marketing

Edition. iGaming Daily is presented by OptiMove,
the number one CRM marketing solution for the

iGaming market. I am joined with fantastic Warren,
who we already know from our previous episodes,

and Natalia, who I managed to work with very
shortly when she brushed with iGaming industry.

I started to follow her and I'm ever so impressed
with her SEO knowledge and the work she's doing

for SEO. So I'm very happy she agreed to join
us. Lady and gentlemen, please introduce yourself

and then we jump into our topic. Hi, Ivana,
thank you so much for having me. Hi everyone

who's listening, I'm Natalia. I specialize in
international SEO. And as Ivana mentioned,

I had a brief experience with iGaming specifically,
and now I have a wider experience. Anything

international is my kind of game. So basically
iGaming because we're very international. Exactly.

Exactly, overlapping a lot with what I do for
any other type of client because obviously

scaling is unbelievable in the gaming industry
as well. Exactly. And Warren. Hi Ivana, thank

you again for the invite. Super happy to be
here again. And hello everyone listening. So

my name is Warren. I've been doing SEO for 13
years now. And I've worked with quite a number

of industries, finance, tech, and lately, iGaming
for the last six years or so. Pretty overall

knowledge in SEO, tech content off page. So
yeah, quite an interesting topic ahead as well.

So we're looking forward to getting to it. And
I'm Ivana Flynn, and I'm your host for this

episode. Today we are going to be talking about
the horrible things that happened to us and

why Google doesn't rank us better. I titled
the episode, Does Google Hate My Website or

Why Am I Not Ranking Better? And that's why
I invited Natalia as an expert across industries,

just to give you peace of mind that this keeps
happening to everyone. and Warren because he's

more from iGaming and this is happening a lot
in iGaming. It is more evergreen topic. If

you are listening to us for a while, you know
that we like to do evergreen topic and then

very trending topic. So we like to keep you
informed very much and educated in SEO. Now

my very first opening question, what is the
usual reason that you encountered throughout

your careers that websites are just not ranking
that good? I can start with that for sure.

I mean, mostly I would say it's it comes down
to a technical issue of some sort on a website.

It could be something that is quite serious,
like accidentally blocking Googlebot. So it

has happened a few times in my career, and it's
quite funny when that happens, because it's

not immediately the first thing that you would
typically check. You're typically checking

SEO-specific things. You know, can only case
are they set correctly, is your... page being

indexed, is your content fine? Was like the
last thing that you check is typically the

obvious thing. But that has happened quite,
you know, more than it should have happened

because it's, you know, it's an obvious thing.
And then also when it comes to indexation,

some websites are typically, you know, they
have heavy JavaScript, they're very bloated

website, a lot of useless pages that, are not
really there for the user and which get little

to no traffic. And eventually sort of that slows
down the whole system, that slows down the

whole website. You know, you face issues with
server response times, DNS related issues.

And typically those things are where I would
go first in order to sort out those types of

issues. Like, you know, tech is the foundation
of any SEO activity that you're doing. So...

Once tech is sorted, then you need to go into
your content strategy or off-page strategy.

What are you doing there? Are you just, you
know, copying competitors? Are you offering

something unique? And there, there we get into
more of the new ones of marketing itself, so

to speak. Don't worry if you didn't understand
Halford, what he said with server requests

and all that will break it down into smaller
words for people that are not SEO in heart.

And Natalia, what do you usually face that is
not just iGaming? What are the issues that

are like, yikes, this is why you're not ranking?
I mean, I love Warren's response, because he's

tackled all of those kind of things you go and
check in a big amount, but to kind of add something

slightly different. Sometimes the most obvious
thing for an SEO is such an opposite to a developer.

And as Warren said, the technical is typically
the one to blame. But especially if you have

developers that never worked with any SEO in
the past. They might do something you haven't

even imagined. I had this client recently, and
it's an interesting one, because it's a website

that operates in whole Europe. So they translated
their website to 20 languages, I believe. And

they were just not ranking in any of the other
languages in the base one, and they were like,

what's happening? Do we have indexing problems?
And the result, it was crawling problems, because

the language selector was just not crawlable
for Google. So what's the smallest fix? turned

out to be amazing outcome as it comes to results,
because as soon as Google saw all the language

versions properly, it really started ranking
very quickly. So it's the most spectacular

things that can happen as actually technical
SEO obstacles that make it impossible for Google

sometimes to even realize the websites are there.
And I used the term that I used for the first

time, instead of orphan pages, they were actually
orphan sites, because the whole website was

orphaned to Google. And I thought, wow, that's
an impressive quick fix and such an amazing

outcome as well. How did you identify that?
I mean, I don't think it would cross my mind

to check there. And it is an issue I've seen
as well in past, but it's like months of looking

and it's like, ah, this. So how did you come
up with it? How did you actually thought that

this might be the issue? This is the benefit
of working in international CO, because I've

seen similar issue in the past. But in this
case, it was quite an obvious one, because

they need to put a pop-up every time a user
changes a language because they are regulated

industry and they had to give like a disclaimer
and I went through this path to actually understand

how we navigate between languages because I
wanted to check a couple of language versions

and I was like oh a hashtag not a URL and that's
what got me checking. Yeah so it was actually

there was there was thinking intelligent thinking
behind it it's just not SEO thinking so there

was a reason But yeah, just navigating for the
website, they gave me the big hint. I would

say analytical thinking is SEO thinking. When
you are SEO, it sounds like a part of marketing,

but we actually cover all of the marketing,
because anyone can screw up, including devs.

And then you are the janitor that needs to come
and clean up. Let's be honest with ourselves.

Absolutely. Mopping every day, that's my job.
This is in SEO. Exactly. But this is where

I see a lot of issues, is the compliance or
having some regulations for. a certain region

and that's where lots of hiccups happen, just
like blocking Google bots, because when you

have, let's say, a territory of, let's say,
Germany, and you are regulated there, yet you

cannot let anyone outside of Germany for iGaming
visit your website, you block everyone outside

of Germany, including Google bots, right? Because
bot is usually coming from America, it's not

a native German speaker, doesn't think like,
yay, I'm coming to visit this website and I'm

from Baden-Baden. So this is where I think when
there is... anything you need to really align

with your SEOs. We had this issue, actually,
several times. And we created a tool. We joined

Google Search Console APIs and was giving us
every 12 hour a ping in our Slack to tell us,

like, Google bots are not entering. And we gave
them several pages. So if you are listening

to this and you many times see something like
this happening, consider building your own

in-house tool to check the Google bot. Yeah,
so technical things are huge. Can you share,

Warren, any SEO horror story that you've seen
that really was technical and dropped you in

rankings or stopped the website ranking, like
Natalia told us about this language switcher?

What you mentioned with sort of blocking Googlebot
from accessing the site, that has happened

on a few websites we've managed, because essentially
you're playing a bit with DNS rules and sometimes

you're blocking more. than what needs to be
blocked. I think the one that sticks between

most was actually an hreflang error where the
country code was wrongly implemented. So we

wanted to target a specific country and instead
we went with the abbreviation of another region

which was very similar. We were sending Google
signals that, hey, we want to rank in this

country, and we're wondering why is our page
ranking like 97 or the pages are not indexed

at all. And then checking those HF lines because
when you're checking search calls, so you see

Google can index this page. There's literally
nothing wrong with the page. And then when

you dig a bit deeper, you're figuring out that
you're telling Google, okay, you need to show

this website in. a particular place, but we're
sending signals for another way. And when we

fixed that, actually, then suddenly Google is
picking up those signals like almost instantaneously.

So we had like one hflang fix, and suddenly
we were on page one, page two, for a number

of the pages we were actively working for. Because
in the meantime, we didn't stop building content,

we didn't stop building backlinks, and we were
getting traffic. So Google was getting the

signals, but we were instructing Google, don't
show the website here. We actually want to

show it at another place that's completely unrelated.
So that was, in retrospect, that is hilarious,

but it was really frustrating at the time, until
you pick up because it was such a minor code

incident that it's easy, even if you're looking
at it, you won't see it immediately. Yeah.

I mean, I think. don't think you realize right
away because you're looking at it the hreflang

is there and if it's just one letter you might
just not realize right away. Exactly and it

made sense when you look at it then when you
go into Aleida Solis on her website had a hreflang

builder and I think I was testing on that and
that's where I noticed the mistake. It was

quite hilarious like it's like a moment of realization.
Oh that's basic. Thank you, Alida. Once again,

Alida, for safe. Well, there are lots of good
free tools that can help us check all of these

things. So if you are an SEO, Alida Solis website
is one of them. But I'm sure you can share

other tools. They'll help you navigate through
SEO technical issues. Which tools are your

faves? I have to say Google Search Console.
It's number one, especially now with the crawling

stats that you can actually learn way more than
in the past. And I don't know about you, but

for my clients, it's really hard to get server
logs. So if I wanted to do several local analysis,

I have very limited possibility to do that.
So this Search Console crawl status is definitely

just one, but not for each of them. They've
deprecated the reports on international targeting.

So this has to be done with external tools.
Yeah, but Google Search Console, bread and

butter to us all. Search Console is the first
space. They're deprecating quite a lot of tools,

even the Disavow tool is on its way out. I mean
the default to me is always comes back to Screaming

Frog as a very powerful tool that is I think
underutilized because the moment you get people

who know how to code some JavaScript and write
some scripts, suddenly Screaming Frog can get

a hundred times better. So it's, you know, Natalia
mentioned server logs if you have access to

developers in the team as well, that's an amazing
place to look at potential issues on your site

as well. Good, absolutely agree. And Screaming
Frog is just so cheap as well when you think

how much it can save you. I think it's an essential
tool for absolutely any SEO. I would say most

of the technical issues we see with new releases
or migrations, do you have any cool horror

story of migrating or release that just went
so wrong and you wanna tell us, so people listening

to this will think of it next time they're releasing
or migrating, because those are my two big

points, like, oh my God, we're releasing, oh
my God, we're migrating. And I love when they

tell me, we're not migrating, we're just changing.
We've heard this one before. Yeah. Um, one

horror story I have maybe to share something,
uh, firsthand experience. Um, it was migrating

at dotnet website and I prepared this beautiful,
uh, redirect plan manually, hundreds of thousands

of URLs. Obviously there were some patterns,
but I kind of, I was at the time at my career,

I didn't kind of understand that I could use.
syntax to multiply, I mean, to take many multiple

URLs and just redirect them through a path.
I was doing it one by one. And it turns out

that.NET websites have got a limit on number
of redirects you can put in the web config

file. And I did not know that at the time. So
it turns out that all my manual work to put

a beautiful Excel file that accounts for every
single URL was such a waste of time, both for

me and for the developers. And that's how I
learned the hard way. You should absolutely

automate any patterns you can find in the URLs
and do it by folders or even more so. And now

with Chatt GPT, it's just so easy to find very
quick patterns in the URLs and basically identify

10 lines of redirects instead of thousands,
because they really overlap in so many ways.

There's logic behind them basically. So yeah,
never manual redirects anymore if possible.

I think this is a fantastic place to mention
how you use an AI to make your life easier.

ChetGBT is absolutely here for this, and I love
that you mentioned it. And talking about horror

stories, I think we should release this around
Halloween. But Warren, do you have anything

from migration that absolutely just rocks your
SEO world and you cannot shake that one off?

Because I have. In my previous job, before iGaming,
I was migrating a website and I accidentally

put no index on all pages. And it took me a
month to realize the client was complaining.

And I was like, yeah, but everything is okay.
And I was so sure that it couldn't be in a

code. I just like arrogantly checked a few things.
And it took me a month to realize. I was like,

yeah, but there was a test. So I completely
had to lie. And yeah. Now, every time it goes

wrong, no index is my first thing to check.
I know it's absolutely crazy basic, but I missed

it for a month, people. But it happens. I mean,
the one story that I have, it was a big migration

as well. Platform change and the URL structure
change. All the redirects and everything were

correctly implemented. But then when the sort
of the release version was pushed into production,

the QA version had no index in it. So the noindex
got also pushed into production. And it takes

Google kind of gives you a bit of a grace period.
So the website was still showing up for the

first three or four days after launch. And then
suddenly, the whole websites, including all

language folders, were completely out of index
for all countries. So there was the noindex

tag there that was there in testing, but which
got pushed out to production. So again, you're

testing the website, everything seems to be
working fine. You're not really checking how

Google is reacting to the new website during
testing. And then you push it in testing and

you forget that one line of code. So that's
all it took. It was thankfully- I'm very happy

it happened to other people. It does, it does.
But thankfully it was a relatively fast recovery.

So the moment you remove that noindex and you
request indexation of the top pages in your

site then Google sort of returns you back to
where you were quite fast. So it's not all

doom and gloom. Well, that's very good, very
good. And just not to be on a technical side,

lately we had lots of releases from Google on
that cleaning parasite and March spring cleaning

with not liking links and not liking content
and not liking anything. This is, I think,

another big reason why websites are, I'm not
saying not being indexed at all, but not ranking

better. Have you seen any of those impacting
your work? I think that we touched on an interesting

thing, Ivan, just now, because you said maybe
not indexing but ranking. And I feel like they're

more and more intertwined and more of the websites
that are low quality that I happen to have

access to. Maybe they are not my recurring clients,
but they are projects I was exposed to at some

point and I still have good search console access.
I see more and more of indexing issues. I feel

like the threshold for Google has changed there.
So whatever they're cleaning on the ranking

level, I think on the indexing level, they're
also becoming more and more... more and more

picky, basically. So I think sometimes ranking
is not just the only problem anymore, which

makes our work harder. And I feel like quality
is becoming issues for these projects I've

seen. And I wouldn't say they are bad websites.
I'd say they're just not SEO upworked. They're

just websites that never had SEO as their first
channel in mind. So they're not investing in

it. I know. And a lot of people still think
that SEO can be just turned on and turned off

any time they want to. Now we have a website
and we want to rank, turning on SEO tomorrow,

position one. And those expectations I think
needs to be mitigated. And that's one of the

reasons we have this, we have this podcast.
And Warren, have you seen any impact of either

the parasite cleanup or the AI? We talked about
this. That was our first podcast was the AI

cleanup and, and the expired domains. Have you
seen any impact? I mean. I still see results

that are using Parasite SEO, so the cleanup
wasn't complete, but Natalia touched upon the

point of quality as well. I think most people
also assume who are not in SEO that we're working

alone. So it's a lot of websites who are trying
to compete for the same keywords. So you need

to also be better than your competition. It's
not that you just are doing good SEO for Google

and for your... creating a good page for your
customer, but what are you doing in comparison

to your competitors? Because they're not sitting
idle while you are optimizing your page and

building backlinks, they might be doing something
else. And I think that is often forgotten as

well, even when we look at what is quality content.
To me, how Google assesses it is as well, how

is your site content compared to your competitors
content? And I think looking into what others

are doing. better than you, if you cannot break
to page one, then there must be something missing.

If you think your content is top notch, if you
have good backlinks, maybe your competitor

is also doing something else. And I think with
all the changes that Google is going through,

it's become much harder to identify specific
things that competitors are doing, because

if you just look at surface level, you're gonna
see more of the same typically. But it's become

a very competitive industry. At this point,
SEO is a very mature kind of practice, right?

It's not how it used to be 10 years ago when
there were 50 SEOs. Now we have hundreds and

hundreds of SEOs all doing mostly good work.
So naturally it's gonna become much harder

to even get to position one. I like to compare
it to Formula 1, right? So there are the best

drivers out there and the difference between
the best driver and the one who comes last

is so minuscule, but sometimes that is what
makes a difference. You might have, think of

a great idea which gives you a competitive edge
and that's what is gonna take you to position

one sometimes. And take a chance, run tests,
take a risk, otherwise you won't get to position

one. That was a very beautiful analogy to close
our podcast. I'm just going to very quickly

summarize. If your website is not ranking very
well, look into your technical issues, that

is a first place. Review your content and backlinks
that is like no-brainer. And as well, stay

on top of changes that are going on with Google
and with your competitors. If you want to win

in this extremely difficult and saturated industry,
and this extremely difficult thing as SEO is,

this is a. I don't even know, are we marketers,
are we just wizards? You need to be on top

of your game. And one way to help you stay on
top of your game is listening to our podcast.

Thank you very much, Natalia. Thank you, Warren.
And I hope you have enjoyed our podcast.