TRAFFIC & STRATEGY
Unwelcome hosts:
Parasite SEO slithers on to disrupt search rankings
For years, iGaming affiliates have been playing chess with Google, finding loopholes in its algorithms. An increasingly powerful and controversial strategy of late has been parasite SEO, a black hat tactic that allows third-party sites to hijack an established domain’ s ranking signals. But with Google’ s Site Reputation Abuse policy( SRA) now in force, how is the game changing – and who’ s being left behind? By Joyce Yang
Not long ago, major newspapers like The Telegraph and The Independent were curiously presenting themselves as betting“ experts”. Enter search terms like“ best bingo sites” or“ best sports betting offers”, and nearly every iGaming keyword was dominated by mainstream media in Google’ s SERPs. The secret wasn’ t a newsroom full of veteran betting writers, but lucrative partnerships with affiliate giants who piggybacked on mainstream publishers’ domain authority for visibility.
For many smaller affiliates, those were frustrating days. Martin McGarry, the owner of soccer stats site StatsChecker and an SEO consultant, likens the inundation to“ the final scenes of The Matrix, where Agent Smith took over the minds of all the inhabitants”.
McGarry recalls:“ Those bigger affiliates and media sites pushed everybody out. My site went from being on page one to page three for certain things. It was a sore moment for me.”
The earthquake, however, hit in full force in May 2024 when Google began enforcing its Site Reputation Abuse( SRA) policy, targeting third-party pages“ published with little or no firstparty oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate Search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’ s ranking signals”. Traffic from wellknown sites like CNN, the LA Times and Forbes Advisor plummeted overnight. The fallout was swift, with listed affiliates such as Better Collective and Catena Media
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