iGaming Daily

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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. This is Ivana and I have a fantastic guest today that is going to be talking about the prohibited SEO topics like head SEO. As you know, we keep talking about SEO and marketing strategies on this channel, on this special edition. for quite a while now, and we usually talk about the healthy SEO approach, the white hat. But if you are looking into SERPs lately, you can see that white hat does not always get promoted, does not always work. And many times Google is so much in trouble, so broken, so lost its marbles that we're seeing very bad SEO practices or not Google recommended SEO practices. And that's why we want to talk about it and we want to explain to you if these practices work, when, and in which geostay should be or could be used, where they should absolutely not be touched, and who better than the BlackHead SEO expert, Daniel. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Ivana. Hello. So shortly, I'm just going to summarize very shortly what is WhiteHead SEO. So it's publishing an amazing content that is based on a wonderful keyword research and clustering and topical authority, building entities so Google can recognize it. creating such a great content that everybody wants to naturally link to your site that happens in iGaming almost daily and have perfect technical setup that doesn't do anything like cloaking or anything we shouldn't do. So that's the Whitehead. And yes, it works. And it works the long term. But if you see that there are some sites that are not exactly doing this, this is Greathead or Blackhead SEO. And for this podcast sake, I would like to say... Right now we should talk about whatever works at SEO because Whitehead does not always win. We see websites that do fantastic Whitehead approach, completely losing their traffic, being degraded, deranked, and Blackhead is winning. that's why we are here. Daniel, shortly, what is in your eyes Blackhead SEO? Which tactics would you say that they are really, really Blackhead-y? So first I would even start with Whitehead because you mentioned organic links. But I think also that guest posts backlinks that are bought by many companies are considered as whitehead. So even though Google says whitehead is completely organic, most whitehead campaigns are not organic. So yeah, just to add that. So I wouldn't consider guest posts blackhead, but they're not organic. So for blackhead, I think, I mean, yeah, of course, special types of backlinks that the site owner doesn't want to have. Then you have tactics like buying expired domains, building PBNs on them, linking out to your own sites, repurposing expired domains for your money sites to rank them as satellites. There are many tactics. Good. I think buying... links. It's because Google doesn't recommend it. It's sort of like greyhead. Like we all do it. Yeah. You know, we all do it because simply you don't get an amazing link to your content or very, very, very rarely because we all writing the same repetitive content. Right. So that's why we need to buy these links. And I just want to put it out there that Google says, do not do this, do not buy links. And then you go to the most wide head conference out there, Brighton SEO. And 90 % of the sponsors are link placement agencies, right? There is everyone who deals with links, link buying, guest posting, all of that, even link insertions, they are the sponsors. So even Brighton knows that we are doing this. So as you said, I think it is white-headed by now. If you are doing it correctly, it could be almost white-headed. Even Google accepts the fact. Exactly. mean, good luck figuring out which link is bought and which is natural, right? Like that's impossible. Exactly. Good. there are things I would never touch Blackhead SEO for like huge brands that are doing well in regulated markets. That is absolutely no go. If you are doing this, if you are a huge brand in regulated markets, you have got your license, you are allowed to be there, you are allowed to use all the other campaigns and social media and TPC and PR campaigns, don't listen to this podcast. It's not for you. But maybe listen to it because you want to know what the other ones that shouldn't be there are doing. This podcast is meant for people that are looking for a short win in markets that are maybe not that extremely regulated or shouldn't really be there. Perfect example is the market. Everybody wants to be in Australia, right? Australia is like a prime example when you see a of not amazing SEO tactics. I really want to talk about Australia. Even where I stay right now in Germany, the most market share is by unregulated casinos because regulations are so strict. Exactly. And unregulated, they don't care if they're to get blocked. So they utilize all the practices they shouldn't do. If you have a brand that can be there, you simply should not break the rules so you don't lose your investment. this is sort of like a disclaimer of, you know, of being careful when considering anything we're going to be discussing. Or if you are doing Turkey, in Turkey, you simply need to do cloaking, right? I mean, you cannot exist in Turkey without having a perfect idea of how to clock your website and make sure that government doesn't close it the next day. Yeah. And you need a lot of special links in Turkey and a lot of redirects and that stuff. So Turkey is also crazy market because Turkey is the third largest crypto holder in the world and people have a lot of crypto to gamble with and the search volumes are insane. The main keyword in Turkey is searched. 1.4 to 1.8 million times a month. So that's a very big keyword. Yeah. And as well in Turkey, you cannot just walk into casino. It's prohibited. So people of course want to play online. Therefore there's a huge market that it's difficult to get to and you will simply not succeed with the wide head practices. So can you shortly explain to people what is cloaking and how is it done? Just very basic because they are not nerds like you. with all due respect. They just want to understand like if you say cloaking, what are we mean? You are, I know, but just I didn't mean any disrespect. I mean it as a, you know, as a compliment. Yeah, I take it positively. So yeah, cloaking can be used in many ways. Cloaking, for example, is also used for PPC and for PBN building and also for money sites and markets like Turkey where you do something that's not allowed. So in general, cloaking is basically showing different types of visitors on your site, a different site. And in case, let's say, of Turkey, where you create an affiliate site on, let's say, an expired domain that you want to rank, there you want to show the government employees a different type of site that's completely legal in their eyes than the people that are coming from the gambling Serbs. going to your affiliate site where you want to redirect them as quickly as possible to your offer and to make money with them. And also what's often happening is that those sites are also cloaked to Googlebot to show an optimized page which ranks much better than a redirect, for example. Yeah, so that's a cloaking technique used in Turkey a lot. But you can also cloak your PBN sites to show Googlebot a certain link to your own site and Ares and Zemrash nothing or different link. So your competitors can't find your PBN. Of course. So if you are cloaking in Turkey, if I understand it correctly, you have one version for a government and governmental employees that are really hunting casinos out there. So it will be like a nail salon or a restaurant, right? Those are the usual suspects. Then there'll be another one for the people to actually go to and convert, either go to operator or, you know, through an affiliate site or being on your operator site, if you are doing that. And another one for Google that is super optimized. So there'll be three different options, right? So quite a headache of technical setup here. You need an expert. Yeah, of course. It's not straightforward. But once you have a working setup, you can deploy that multiple times. That's fantastic. And we know that there is a hunger to go to Turkey. lot of companies do it. Turkish people want to play, so we're basically helping them. And it's good to know that there is a way to do it because it is difficult. But I think on top of cloaking in Turkey, you need to deploy other things such as brain protections if you have one. such as link building and it's not going to be just a normal link building although it should be but as well you can do link inserts because you want to build the link sort of faster as you know the website might get closed off. So can you tell us what's the difference between guest post and link insertion? Yeah, so a guest post is basically a new post that's created a new blog article which contains your link and the link insertion also called niche edit. is where an existing post gets edited and includes a link to your site. Okay, so if I would send you any article that I like out there and say, can you get a link from this? You will simply insert link there. So this is link insertion. We will discuss more Blackhead techniques after a short break. So stay tuned because it is a lot coming. So we are back and we're going to discuss more techniques. We already know what cloaking is and Daniel was in the middle of explaining. how insertion works, which is a really cool tactic. So you were explaining what is link insertion. Can you continue on that? Yeah. So you basically get an insert into a certain post. And of course, in the traditional whitehead way, you have to contact the webmasters and you have a very low approval rate. So you need to really go by volume. And that's of course difficult because... most webmasters are not open, especially not open to link to gambling sites. And so that's why also there are people that do link inserts in a forceful way, basically where they use technical, let's say, loopholes to place a link on the site. So that's also what I observe a lot. Like a code insertion, right? Yes. But does this last, if you do it the tricky way, wouldn't that be taken down in week two or month or three? Or is that going to be there forever? I mean, of course some, yeah, it depends, but let's say the people who do it, they, I think they see a rate of 10 % link lose rate per month. So, so it's quite manageable because you can always build more links. And they are quite cheap, quite easy to do that way. So like the removal rate is negligible to the overall economics of the campaign. Fantastic. It's good to know this exists because I know from the Whitehead approach and linking search, for example, I will be working for a big brand. I see we have got mentions on this website. I would ask them if they would kindly link to us. And as you said, the reply rate is... almost non-existent. mean, maybe one in hundred, they'll be like, yeah, okay, whatever. But it's not really a viable tactic anymore. But it used to work years ago, by now people don't care. And as you say, they know it's gaming, they just gonna charge arm and leg. So if you are doing the markets where your website might be getting closed off or redirected, maybe insertion is a good practice for doing links because you need to do them quite fast as well. because you never know how long the website lives. As well, you mentioned PBNs. I'm sure a lot of people know what PBNs are, but a lot of people don't know. And I would like to, once you explain them, I would like to know how would I see lately as a usage for PBNs. How the usage is right now in the world? Yeah. I PBNs are basically you create your own network of links and you manipulate where you point them, right? Yeah. So I have some insights because I also found the software as a service in that space. where we index all the PBN sites that Ares and Zemrash don't find and we analyze them. So from that, I can tell that PBNs are still up and thriving. And they are also being used for LLM manipulation nowadays. So not just for Google SEO, because you have for you to be included or be deeply connected into an LLM to have a high likelihood to be mentioned. you need a lot of context in the LLM. So you need entity relationships where you have other posts that are writing about a similar topic to link out to your site. So the LLM model learns that your site is connected to a topic and PBMs are perfect for that. So they have a bright future, I think. There's just the issue of expired domains where Google doesn't like this, of course, and they try to find ways to make it harder to use expired domains to repurpose them as PBN sites. But there are also ways around it because, of course, always it's for Google a decision between solving an issue and creating collateral damage. And if you as the SEO or Black Hat SEO go very, very close to, let's say, a behavior that also a normal site could do. It's very hard for Google to stop this without creating too much collateral damage. Of course. think most of the removals happen when somebody reports to Google for DMCA dig down or you know, you actually, there is a link on Google where you can go and submit like this website is using links and then you show them the backlink profile. And if it's all PBNs and expired domains and redirects and canonicals, then they might get removed. So I think that's the only time really that you are. you're sort of in threat. So if I would be using this, if I would have a website that is built on expired domain and not just that, but is using very, very bad black hat techniques to get my links, I would block things like hrebsbot to, you know, so people cannot actually see. I would do that. That would be my trick. I actually see a huge usage of PBNs right now to parasite SEO posts. So you publish parasite SEO posts or part of your website or completely hijack an existing website, change it, and then you push like all of your PBN to that, run for one or two months, lose it all, fine, you made your money and do it all again. So this is what I'm seeing lately because they know it's short-lived, but they don't care because the money is there. So Parasite SEO is another headache of Whitehead SEOs. I'm sort of like this love-hate relationship with Parasite SEO because I think on one hand is extremely genius, right? you can actually use someone's website to make money without having the cost of hosting, building the website, maintaining the website, having team of developers. Obviously, you still need to invest, you still need content, you still need links, you usually redirect your PBNs. So on one hand, I find it ingenious. On the other hand, I hate Google that they keep promoting enough to saying it's bad and we're going to be punishing it. So none of this we are saying is bad. We're just saying that Google is broken and allows you to do this right now. So Okay, I don't want anyone feel that we attacking them here. Cause this is really saying how Google is allowing everything they saying you should not do. What is your absolutely favorite blackhead technique? Like if you have to choose one from all the things that you know how to do, what would that be? Is it CTR manipulation? Is it the on-page manipulation? Is it PBNs? What would it be? Mine is definitely Parasite SEO. If it's done right, it just works perfectly. If it's not done right, it makes you money and it disappears. But I'm mesmerized by that tactic. So what's yours? That's a good question. I think for me right now, it's a viral traffic because it works so quickly and it's quite safe. I wouldn't say it's 100 % safe, but it's actually very hard for Google to stop this. And also it's something which regulated. Operators also are open to do because the risk is very low. And since return on best is so quick, like few days maximum, few hours earliest, it's a very powerful tactic. But a combination of that with Parasite SEO and also link inserts, I think work very well for brand protection. So if you have an operator and there are many SERPs that are polluted, with rogue affiliates or other negative sites, or let's say sites talking negative about your brand, you can very quickly gain control over that by building a lot of parasites, building links to them, and pushing them with the right type of traffic. So that's something, a combination I really like nowadays. I have to see how X-Rite domains will develop with Google, how they will... try to further diminish the effect. But right now it's also something which is an evergreen. Absolutely. I talking about expired domains, I previously said I really want to talk about Australia. This is the case. The one website that is currently absolutely killing it for online casino, online pokies, online casinos, online casino Australia on position one. And any money keywords you can think of position one, two, three, is this website that is on drop domain. Previously was some technical website. They just bought it, built an affiliate website with almost no content and extreme amount of things. mean, in last few months from beginning of this year, almost 4,000 links, over 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. Don't get me wrong. The people doing this know what they're doing. It's just exactly opposite of Google said that you should do. So 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. I'm sure this website, either Google will discover or somebody nastier than me will go and actually submit the take down by Google. I would not do it. I have no gain. You know what I mean? But a lot of people would. So if you are looking into these practices and you are not doing it in a clever way, in combination with some white hat practices as Daniel keeps preaching here that you should combine it and mask it not to be taken down and killed right away. You will be killed. Your website going to be live one, two, three, four months. You will make your money. So if you are looking into blackhead, be careful, count with it, that it can be taken down. You can lose your investment. And if you are going to do it, please do it with an expert. I highly recommend Daniel. I work with him. on some practices I learned from him a lot because obviously I'm not a black head SEO so when I have any question I think Daniel. Daniel closing words what would you say? First of all thank you for having me and let's see what the future brings. I think right now you're right with Google being broken. I think also chaturity is broken and everything is broken because those systems are so complex. that they cannot, let's say, they cannot create full SEO safety to them. So there's always a loophole. SEO will never be dead. And let's stick with the term SEO. Absolutely. My last words would be you can do everything as long as you do it carefully and in a clever way. You can do horrible things in a clever way. You can do the most safest things in a clever way. Right. So be clever about any approach, about white-head SEO, about black-head SEO, about combining it. Be careful. and do it in a proper, proper way. And last words are absolutely wishful. Let's make Google great SEO again, because by now they are the worst SEO on the planet. Thank you, Daniel. Lovely having you. Thank you, Ivana.