iGaming Daily

00:00
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 Ivana Flin and I'm welcoming my two wonderful guests, Hector and John. Huge name in marketing, huge name in SEOs and today we'll be talking about really dirty business, cleaning up Google penalties. Hello guys, shortly introduce yourself please.

00:29
And we're gonna dive into it. Hector, welcome. Hello. Thank you Ivana for having me. I'm Hector. I'm technical SEO in Evoke. And I've been here working on technical parts in SEO since five years ago. And I'm really happy to join, invite me to this podcast. So thank you very much. Thank you for accepting our invite.

00:58
And John, mean, no need to introduce yourself, but just in case there is some weird soul out there and never heard of you, ladies and gentlemen, John. Yes, I'm very keen to hear more about Hector's technical experience. I have less of the technical SEO background, but more focused on B2B lately, affiliate coaching. So I try to help affiliates and I have the luxury like Ivana to interview a lot of really good SEO people. So I think Hector and Ivana, I'll get you both on my show at some point. So.

01:27
My job is to ask the stupid questions to learn from experts like you guys. This is why I love podcasts and running podcasts because I always learn. And when it comes to Hector's technical SEO abilities, he is one of the top. I worked with him. I hired him for Mr. Green William Hill. And whatever took us like two or three days of analyzing of what's going on, Hector had it in a few hours. So he is probably the best of the best that we can have in iGaming technical. He's seen it all.

01:55
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. he's here because lots of this Google down rankings and lots of penalties come as well from technical. You'll be of course, John telling us about affiliate because they see much more due to like of branding or being a little bit more adventurous with trying new approaches. And I will be moderating and learning. So Google penalties and this is a nasty one. We all experienced them, right? What is the worst?

02:22
absolutely worst penalty you have seen. Was it manual? Was it algo? You haven't experienced one. You have been that lucky. What is it? I mean, this year and last year were crazy, right? So, John, as you are coming from affiliates, they've seen penalties left and right. Every time Google sneezes and runs some updates, some affiliate website disappears from the, you know, SERPs completely. So, Cher, what have you seen? Tell us the gory details. The stuff I usually see are not really

02:51
situations where people are crying, know, it's like large sites like this happened a long time ago with Ask Gamblers, LCB.org, even Phoenixio. When they lose, it's not a sad story because they made so much money that they're basically pushing the limits of SEO that when they crash and they're maybe taken out for nine months, that this was worth it for them to do it. So yeah, if you want to take those risks, go ahead. But I think it depends on, you know, what kind of

03:19
site you're dealing with and how far are you in the journey. Like, imagine Casino Meister getting a penalty, which I don't think they've ever had one, but they've never really pushed the limits of SEO. So the stuff I'm kind of dealing with when I talk to affiliate friends is less on the penalty side and it's more on the new changes in Google where they're just basically being ignored by Google. So I'm very fortunate that I haven't had a lot of penalty experience, but...

03:46
Maybe I kind of wish I did because when I see those people with penalties, they seem to be in a very good position where they've made so much money that the penalty was worth all the effort. And when I see how they recover from it, I just learned from them. mean, like LCB, like they're LCB.org because they used to be latest casino bonuses.com. They made a very extreme change in saying, let's change the domain. Let's make it.org make it so it's kind of cleaner. They just did a big change in that.

04:16
You know, I asked Joshua from LCB when that happened and he said that worked out really well. But even if it didn't, I don't think he'd be crying. Yeah, but I mean, that's it. That's with affiliation. They are very adventurous. They always try the newest. They push the limits. mean, Parasite SEO, you don't see it on operator side, right? That's affiliates. And it works. mean, heads down, I got obsessed by it, studying it, understanding it.

04:41
I almost cried when Techopedia got hit three times because I was obsessed with the websites. I used to call it the king of the parasite SEO. And when it got hit, actually, I was really sad because I was learning from it every step of the way how they're doing it, as well as gamblers or time to play. You know, they took, take risks. I don't know what they're doing, but I know some, I'm not saying those, but some buy traffic. They manipulate CTRs. Google is going to find that out. But in meanwhile, if you want that,

05:10
and you can afford that, then of course make that money and moving on. And these affiliates, they do this, they never had just one project, right? They have got projects after projects. And many times it's true, you cannot recover from the penalty. You just can't, you move on, right? But as you said, redirection works. Redirection usually works longer term, but as well, Google not giving you love, it's sort of penalty. It's a sandbox. Google is telling you, you're not good enough for us to actually show you to our visitors.

05:39
How do you deal with Google sandbox? I personally, my dealing with it is hating it, but Hector, okay, go ahead. I like the way that John said about how you push your limits. To be honest, in terms of an SEO, it's what we want. We want to try to find which is the limit, where we can go. And of course we want to have this, in some way an SEO having a penalty.

06:09
It's like, oh, you have a medal because you try to go really far. But the question here is, which are the strategy? First of all, it's something that you want to maintain in the long term because maybe when you are going so far, it's just something really temporary. So we need to be sure that we are doing an oxo sacri. It depends on the company, et cetera, as operator or you have.

06:38
Really, you need to be sure what you are doing because you can't afford a penalty or it's really dangerous for you. So for that reason, okay, you try to follow the rules as much as possible to avoid any time or any kind of thing that can affect you and your results especially. Because the goal is to make money, that's the goal.

07:05
Yes, but penalty can be liquidational for some, know, if you have lots and lots and lots of assets out there and one pick-up penalty and you can carry on, that's great. But imagine if you bought a penalty to mrgreen.com or williamhill.com, mean, bye bye, Hector, that could be your last day on a job. You know what I mean? Like in operator side, you need to be much more careful. You cannot afford traffic manipulation, CTR manipulation. You go careful with backings that we don't buy, we earn them. Absolutely. We're very careful with that.

07:34
But on affiliates, you can go wild, wild, wild. And I want to talk about here something else as well. Google constantly runs something, either a new update or you're just testing something in a local market. Currently Australia is going crazy. There's a lot of heat there. And people start to panic because naturally when Google tests or run anything, you see volatility, right? That's completely normal. And my problem is, and I see it a lot, people panic.

08:02
And they are all, goodness, we dropped 20 clicks a day. What would you tell them? Because I say, sit on your hands, don't panic with your turn, because most likely it's going to come up. And if it doesn't, then you start to deal with it. But what's your approach? One from affiliate, one from operator. How would you go about it, What I've done in this situation of just sending referrals to SEO agencies and kind of getting a chance to be behind the curtains and watch what they do.

08:29
It's always a weird mix. mean, they're always trying to improve link building to make it a quality approach and they're always very critical of content. So yeah, it's I'm personally just kind of watching what's happening and we have like where we sit as a company is we have a lot of gambling affiliates that do SEO as their marketing channel as customers. Sometimes when we see that we've lost the customer, it's for that reason because they Google's been so volatile for them that they're like, hey guys, like, look, we've just lost like

08:59
you know, 90 % of our revenue in a short period of time. So it's very difficult to kind of recover. What I've been doing behind the scenes is asking the cost of question. What do do SEO affiliates need to do to stay on top of this to avoid either penalties or in the situations when Google becomes volatile? And the common answers I get back is I think technical SEO always should be invested in. But the common answers are kind of like I think a lot of people lack quality.

09:26
Like Google's changed so much that it's basically forcing these basic review sites to kind of suffer. Like ones that would rank well in New Zealand and Australia that have been just printing money for years. They're not working anymore. And we've actually had some potential customers that I know for a fact we will never have them as a customer because they've lost 90 % of their traffic and I can see it on Ahrefs. So I think it's not easy to pivot and say, what is a product? Like, know, can you build a product or service?

09:54
that's super useful that people mention naturally or makes your job as a link builder 10 times easier. Like I like referencing sites like Ask Gamblers and Casino Meister. It's like, why did Gentoo acquire them? Because they're products that they stand on their own and they build links naturally without even trying. And imagine if you put an effort into both link building, technical SEO. mean, these are the assets that I see on the affiliate side that are being constantly acquired. And if you look at the companies like

10:23
Game Lounge, Better Collective that are going, what are they buying? And in gambling.com, like they're buying more products. Like odds jam for 160 million. That's a big product that stands on its own. And what I think is special here is like, if you give these amazing products or projects and you put them in like your hands or Hector's hands, that's where I'd wanna see how big these things can get when you've got the right SEO people cranking them out. Yeah, and how operators deal with that.

10:52
We will get back after a short break. Good. So yes, I think a lot of thinking in affiliate part, just to close this thought is if we cannot beat them, we buy them. That's what we see a lot in Katena, Game Lounge, all of these huge places, Legend. But operators have completely different game here, right? So how would you deal with it, Hector? And I remember we always had like, there's a volatility. We lost one position on a huge keyword, which of course it's money, but...

11:22
people like, oh my goodness, do something, do something, especially the commercial would go crazy. How do you do it? I mean, you have got an extreme amount of SEO experience on your belt. What is your recommendation? Because we see this always, all the time. At least once a month, there is a massive volatility. Usually it's not announced from Google, but what do do? I think one of the things that is more important to do is to track the things. And I mean, track is what did you change in terms of content, in terms of

11:51
servers or in terms of the website, what domains you buy, et cetera. All these things you need to traffic because when you saw a drop, you can see a spot exactly when was that. And in that case, you can see, okay, that day that we drop, what we changed? Or there were an update on the servers or

12:20
I don't know, we change the content. And that gives you a clue. This is, to be honest, it's really complex, you are working in a big, you are working in a company that's big and you have a lot of departments. It's quite complex to find all the information and to gather all the information. Also, I would say that affiliates also,

12:48
and compare with operators based on the technology that they are using is totally different. It's not the same a site that is a WordPress or something like that. It is a HTML rather than operator that is using a JavaScript, which is more complex to try to render properly for Google, et cetera. Maybe you have problems in rendering and you are showing the customers one thing and Google is seeing other. Those kinds of things you need to be aware and be.

13:16
clear that you don't have this type of issues. Yeah. So I think the lesson here is not every drop is a Google penalty. Many times it's us. We change something. You change load balancers, right? People don't even think this is SEO, but people think this is SEO because they are absolutely essential, especially on huge sites for the traffic to be equally distributed so we can crawl it. People can actually visit it. It doesn't crash all the time. So we change this and it drops or you change caching.

13:45
And it drops. many times people panic and think, oh my goodness, we picked up a naughty Google hates us. Google did something and it does. So as Hector said, once the Google algorithm sort of stop rolling, so you don't know what's hitting you left and right, start to, if you don't recover fully back and go higher potentially, you start to look at what you have done, what your developers done. And I think this is where people don't understand how

14:11
Communication is important. In a small company, it is easy. If it's five of you, you all know what you're doing. But in a place like Evoke, where you have got huge websites like 888, William Hill, Mr. Green, the communication is crucial. And I think that's what companies could do better, in my humble opinion, is education on SEO. Hek, do you want to say something? I see it on you. Sorry. I would say that this applies not only when you drop, also when you go up.

14:40
You need to see, okay, why this tab? And it's important because, okay, maybe we can replicate this to other websites. So it's important to track this, but only for jobs, even for going up. Absolutely, because you can be under attack that works very temporarily and it looks like, oh my goodness, we're getting all this position. Yet you are being given negative SEO attack by links or some weaponized crawling thing going on.

15:07
or something that is actually might hurt you long-term. So yes, even if you're going up, even though we don't like to look at it because it's like, we just like to pray, please keep going up. Or we are being, you know, crawled more from some AI thing because you know, lot of scrapers out there and you think, oh, this is looking good for me. And then you need to explain why did you go up and why you suddenly down? So yes, keep that in mind. Even if you're going up, you need to understand why you're going up. And hopefully it's a good reason why you're going up because you're an amazing SEO. But

15:36
If there is something fishy going on behind the scenes, you need to know about it. Good. I think now we need to discuss a little bit difference between algopenalty and manual penalty because time ago manual penalty was like certain death, right? Now manual penalty, tell you, you messed up here, please clean up this and you can recover. We saw it on Phoenixiocytes. You can recover within days, weeks, which is amazing. And I think by now the algopenalty is a little bit more difficult than it used to be. Where do you stand on this?

16:07
Which one would you rather pick up if you have to choose this way? Neither. Yes, but you have to choose. Gun to your head. Manual or algo? I would say manual. I know that it's washed, but at least Google provides you some information about what happened. When it's changing the algorithm, you don't know what happens, what is the thing. Yeah, I would say the same. Yeah, because you go to Google Search Console and you get

16:37
Okay, not a good wake up call when you see the manual penalty, but they tell you like on this page, we get AI content, too many links, manipulation here, manipulation there, or it's a, you know, take down because you are in a land you shouldn't be so maybe you are displaying too much in Australia where you really don't have a license and you shouldn't be visible at all. they took you down for some legal reasons. But as you said, I'll go you just

17:01
You need to do that audit yourself. You need to go through every link. You need to go through every attack and for all the content and just thinking like, is this being seen as AI content? Because when I'm writing, I sound like AI. So yes, I'm with you. I would rather pick up none. But if I have to, then manual. And it's still, you might recover it like this and you might recover it never because Google. They're just going to say like what I think is important as well. It's like when you're trying to like, you

17:28
help management understand what's happening and to make the right decisions. There's nothing worse than getting the advice of like lots of different SEOs on like when it's manual, it's like you're in a narrow path. You kind of know what to fix when it's algo. It's kind of like you're going to get so many different things. And what I think is maybe unfortunate about our space is that sometimes the person who sells the solution the best ends up getting the contract or you actually.

17:55
Like the people that need to make the right decisions don't always have the power to it. And then you're constantly fighting with management about trying to educate them on a topic that, you know, I think this is one of our weak spots in the industry. We have management that understands how valuable SEO is, but they don't know where to start. And sometimes they, they trust the right thing they want to hear. Like everyone wants to hear the wrong thing. We'll get you back to number one. And it's like that, that sells everything, unfortunately. Absolutely. But you are right. How many C levels are from SEO?

18:24
Sorry, Hector, go ahead. I just wanted to put that out there. How many? No, no, no. It was just that it's exactly what you said before. Education. We need to educate them because it's not waste your time. We need to tell them that people teach them and explain it in an easy way. If not, they don't understand anything. Absolutely. Exactly. And this is what the podcast is about. It's education, just to give people a little bit of idea how SEO works. Obviously, if you want to go the...

18:51
to the dark side, welcome, become an SEO. But if you don't, then you just want to understand a little bit how things work. Listen to us, listen to Hector, listen to John and pick our brains. But I loved what you said that it is a problem when you get algo and now so many people give you opinions, especially when you get outside agencies. If they are selling content, they're going to say your content is bad. If they are selling links, they're going to tell you you need to clean up links and we need to rebuild all your backlink profile.

19:16
If they are doing any AI solutions, they will say, need to be a little bit more AI driven and into automate. you basically never get the real thing. That's why I think you to usually have at least one really good thing, run really good SEO in-house that tells you like, yeah, could be, but could be as well load of, you know, lies. Good. So here we go. Education is the clue. And I hope you really enjoyed this podcast with Hector.

19:45
and with John and sorry, it was just so short. mean, 20 minutes ago like this, we managed to share very, very, very little. So I think we'll have to be back this year with observing what happened penalties wise, Google updates wise, sometimes in November, December, you know, to tell people like, we were right, you were wrong sort of thing. Thank you for joining me. Thank you very much. Thank you.