TRAFFIC & STRATEGY
overall, they also enjoy the advantage of having a wealth of resources, which provide“ the option to double down on their own properties, adapting to deliver the user-centric content Google continues to reward”.
Additionally, Mawson notes that larger companies may take a more aggressive M & A approach to“ absorb smaller sites punching above their weight”, as seen in Better Collective’ s recent purchases, including AceOdds and Playmaker Capital, which helped the company counter revenue declines despite stagnating organic growth.
But it’ s not all doom and gloom for the smaller players. Jon Earnshaw, chief product evangelist for Pi Datametrics, points out that smaller teams can respond much more quickly to today’ s evolving search landscape than their larger competitors.
“ I’ d rather be a small affiliate now, because small equals agile,” Earnshaw explains.“ If you are a small business and you are keeping your eyes on the landscape to create credible content that your audience genuinely wants to read, then you are going to win.”
In contrast, larger companies, he says, are bogged down by roadmaps and lengthy processes.“ They tend to get stuck in this mentality of carrying on doing what they were doing last year because that worked really well. But things have changed, and they won’ t be able to create new content in time.”
A clumsy Google
At the time of writing, The Independent’ s content still ranks on the first page for many igaming keywords. The trick, as explained by Kostin, is that the publisher simply removed the“ sponsored” tag and marked the content as editorial. A listicle titled“ Best bingo sites in the UK in 2025”, for example, appears under the culture category and occupies the number one spot on SERP.
“ The SRA policy feels very clumsy,” says Kostin.“ It’ s inconsistent and lacks transparency. It’ s difficult to pinpoint why some sites rank higher than others, even when factoring in common sense, content quality and Google’ s EEAT guidelines. Even Google doesn’ t fully follow its own standards, as seen with Google Flights dominating travel-related keywords.”
According to McGarry, part of Google’ s sloppiness comes from the current manual action of SRA enforcement, in which a human reviewer decides whether the site complies with the policy.
“ There’ s some evidence that Google has targeted bigger affiliates and media sites,” he says.“ Google will probably carry on with the manual action for a long time. There’ s no absolute solution to parasite SEO, and there’ s still a lot of it at the moment.”
Other evasion tricks spotted by Kostin and McGarry include publishing undeclared native ads, link cloaking, hiding content using Javascript ad blockers and opting for dynamic URLs. Some affiliates have also gone rogue, hacking into WordPress sites and unmaintained CMSs to produce a steady churn of parasite pages.
In addition, Hyun Lee, an SEO consultant for Mr Gamble based in Estonia, noted that“ Google’ s algorithm along with SERP features are wildly different” across regions due to language and culture variations. This results in some markets, such as the US, being more volatile than others.
Nevertheless, McGarry cautions against pushing Google’ s limit, as he believes the platform will tighten its regulations over time and eventually devise algorithms to counter SRA. Obsessing with loopholes, he says, will only give affiliates“ more reasons to be
Martin McGarry, owner of StatsChecker
punished” in Google’ s future updates.
“ Because of the rampant abuse from all the media sites, Google will probably build systems that reduce their ability in the future to rank for broader topics. It’ s a broad, indirect punishment for everyone. It’ s affiliates’ fault for pushing too hard on the deals. It’ s the media’ s fault for grabbing them with both hands,” McGarry explains.
A little more conversation
2024 was rocky for SEO professionals. The SRA update is only part of Google’ s spam policies, alongside four core updates and the rollout of a series of features, including the
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