5 SEO Black Hat Tricks That Ruin Gambling Sites

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Gambling sites are notorious for trying to find clever ways to increase their ranking in search results but beware.

Search engines like Google are getting smarter. And many of these SEO black hat tactics are ruining websites, destroying their visibility.

Protect yourself by learning common tactics that could ruin your website.

Link Farming

Link farming got a lot of sites in trouble a couple years ago. And yet gambling websites persist in trying to use link farming techniques.

A link farm is a set of websites that are built for the sole purpose of linking to other websites in order to increase backlinks. Unfortunately, search engines like Google not only look at the number of links but the authority of the sites linking to your gambling site.

In the case of link farms, the sites have no significant authority. They often attempt to build authority by linking to each other and having the “real” sites link back. But it’s all a twisted web of deceit. And Google doesn’t like it.

When Google doesn’t like something, they punish the website with lower rankings.

You should check the quality of your backlinks.

Affiliate Backlinking

Affiliate backlinking is a form of link farming that deserves its own section because it’s so prevalent on gambling sites. This SEO black hat tactic is defined by the creating of a seemingly harmless “in house” link farm.

Most gambling organizations have multiple websites under one umbrella. Many of these sites have a high website authority. They can, therefore, add some significant “link juice” to other sites under that umbrella by linking to them.

They do this in a seemingly legitimate way through their affiliate ads for the other sites.

But search engines are getting smarter. They can tell that these sites are directly related to each other. You risk penalties in your ranking by using this SEO black hat tactic.

To be safe, make affiliate links “no follow”. And get your backlinks the white hat way by creating linkable content.

Whether you’re Betting Gods or Harrah’s this can hurt you.

Too Much Focus On One Keyword

Old SEO involved something called “keyword stuffing”. In this, the word (or phrase) that the gambling site wants to rank for is used over and over to the point of sounding unnatural.

The idea was that the more you use that one word, the higher you’ll rank for it.

But SEO today is more about context. This is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Rather than focus on using one word over and over, a page should focus on using words that complement the keyword to demonstrate that the page is comprehensive and on topic.

Hiding text involves making certain text too small for a human to read so that you can stuff it with keywords. Search engines are on to you. And this will hurt your gambling site.

Undercover Duplicate Content

Finally, some sites create duplicate content to save time and money. Many don’t realize that they’re doing it.

You might take a page off one website, use a program to substitute some words for synonyms and change some composition. This isn’t duplicate content, is it? Search engines say “yes”.

All content on each site and across sites should be original. Original content can only be written by a human being.

SEO Black Hat Will Ruin Your Gambling Site

Google says that SEO is all about being more focused on providing your customer with what they’re looking for. Using “tricks” to rank higher will only hurt your site.

Learn more about current SEO best practices to increase your visibility through SEO.