TRAFFIC
Figure 3: Link building and content marketing popularity as
search terms
(Source: Google Trends)
Figure 4: A detail of Betclic’s Top Players dashboard
further extended this harsh approach
towards link-building, also scrutinising
methods previously considered “white
hat”, such as infographics7, widgets’
distribution8 and guest blogging9,
essentially leaving pure content marketing
initiatives and digital PR as the only
available link-building methods for
webmasters not willing to risk breaching
Google’s guidelines. It is therefore far
from coincidental that since 2013 content
marketing-related searches outnumber by
far those about link-building techniques,
which have been in decline since 2011
(see Figure 3).
Content marketing in the gambling
world
risks of aggressive link-building methods,
writing about them on its blogs2, releasing
forms to out link-buyers3, declaring war
on paid links when presenting at industry
events4 and releasing declarations to some
of the reference websites for webmasters
worldwide5.
Google’s increasingly harsh war on
link-building combined with improvements
in its algorithm - above all the release
of the Penguin algorithm in 20126 led to a significant reduction in link
acquisitions based on the most artificial
methods, including article directories, link
pyramids, exchanges and purchases. This
pushed webmasters towards undertaking
content marketing based link-building
initiatives like guest blogging, widgets and
distribution of infographics via Digital PR.
In the most recent years, Google has
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.it/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r2vp4x-JtU
5
http://searchengineland.com/official-selling-paid-links-can-hurt-your-pagerank-or-rankings-on-google-12360
6
http://insidesearch.blogspot.it/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
7
http://searchengineland.com/cutts-infographic-links-might-get-discounted-in-the-future-127192
8
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-i-recommend-nofollowing-links-on-widgets-169487
9
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/
10
http://topplayers.betclic.it - now offline
Considering how competitive the
gambling world is when it comes to SEO,
content marketing initiatives in this niche
are often considered nigh on impossible,
unpractical or useless since - as I have
heard more than one gambling-focused
SEO declare - “there are no such things as
spontaneous links in the gambling world”.
This, however, is a misconception. In
fact, it is possible to find many content
marketing initiatives in this world, several
of which have been very successful.
Their forms include interactive mini-sites,
downloadable white papers and interactive
tests. A few successful examples follow.
For 2014’s World Cup, Italian betting
site Betclic.it launched an interactive
dashboard allowing users to compare key
World Championship players in terms
of skill, statistics and track records10.
The initiative earned the site more than
150 links from more than 50 different
sites across the sports, tech, news and
marketing fields (see Figure 4).
2
3
4
iGB Affiliate Issue 52 AUG/SEP 2015
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