Post on 17-Feb-2021
90 Digital iGaming Reports: SEO Risk in iGaming Risk of being hit by a Google update has doubled in 17 months
June 2013 - Gillis van den Broeke
About the Author Gillis van den Broeke is the Director of Data & Operations at 90 Digital.
Originally from the Netherlands, but now living in London. He holds a BSc. and
MSc. with distinction. Gillis has experience as freelance digital marketer and
was manager of an online marketing programme at Unibet. Now he is
responsible for all data gathering, data mining, data analysis, and operation
management activities at 90 Digital.
Email the author for questions and feedback:
Gillis.vandenbroeke@90digital.com
Visit linked in profile: uk.linkedin.com/in/gillisvandenbroeke/
About 90 Digital 90 Digital, the agency driven by data. They leverage data and analytics for measurably better outcomes
for all parties. Based in London and specialising in the iGaming industry, they provide advanced search
planning and strategy, complex content campaigns and effective social marketing.
For more information, and a fresh copy of this report visit: 90digital.com
mailto:Gillis.vandenbroeke@90digital.comhttp://uk.linkedin.com/in/gillisvandenbroeke/http://90digital.com/
Executive Summary
Google is tightening its fight against ‘webspam’ in their rankings. In the iGaming sector, many companies
that depend on Google traffic for their revenue are exposed to risk of losing rankings in the near future.
To understand how much risk sites are exposed to, we gathered data on 4378 domains ranking in the
top 20 search results in Google.co.uk for 210 keywords during 17 month, representing 767,190 monthly
search volume. 67% of these sites were affiliates, 8 % operators, and 25% other sites. 54% were
considered small, and 46% large.
The major findings were that:
Risk of losing 6 or more ranking positions, but remaining in the top 20, doubled over the last 17
months, from 4% to 8%.
Risk of disappearing from the top 20 remained stable during 2012, but rose in the first 5 months
of 2013 from 17% to 26%. Note that this percentage includes sites that dropped for reasons
other than ‘spammy links’.
The risk is higher if you are a casino or bingo site. If you are an affiliate you are also exposed to more
risk, although operators risk exposure is catching up quickly with affiliates. Being bigger is still good, but
it matters less than it used to.
The data suggests that Google is getting serious about fighting webspam. The risk of losing rankings is
increasing if your backlink profile contains a lot of ‘spam’. The recommended strategy is high quality
content and outreach to get ‘good’ links that google will not devalue. Is this is an expensive exercise,
deliberate planning and structured execution is recommended.
,
Introduction
Your risk in doing SEO (search engine optimisation) is increasing. By how much? This report gives insight.
We answer the following questions:
What do the top 20 search results across iGaming look like?
What is the chance you get hit by an update?
How did penguin 2.0 affect search results across iGaming?
To help you understand what the risk is SEO in and how it is changing, we analysed almost 69,593 data
points covering 17 months of rankings for 210 iGaming keywords on Google.co.uk.
SEO in iGaming is risky because the potential rewards are high. This means that companies push the
limits of Google, and Google pushes back by devaluing links it considers spam.
Understanding risk is important, because the revenue streams of many companies depend on organic
search traffic. They would be severely if they did not receive search traffic. Thus, quantifying the risk is
essential. If you push too far, your domain will be toasted.
In part 1 of the report we analyse top 20 results of the top iGaming keywords. You will learn which
sectors are most expensive, the ratio of affiliates to operators, and the distribution of small and large
sites.
Part 2 will enable you to understand the trends in the risk of getting hit by an update and disappearing
from the top search results. We show you evidence that risk has nearly doubled over the last 17 months,
and that it is accelerating. Casino and bingo sites are most exposed. Long term trends will be made
visible and data for poker, bingo, casino and sports-betting, operators and affiliates, large and small sites
will be analysed.
PART 1: Industry Landscape
Part 1 looks at the ‘search
engine landscape’ in
iGaming. This part gives you
valuable insights in
differences between
keywords, sectors, types of
sites, and size of sites.
THE KEYWORDS For our research, we analysed the top 20
positions in Google for 210 keywords. We
used historic monthly ranking data from
SEMrush.com going back to January 2012. The
Keywords are the top iGaming keywords in the
UK, divided into the sectors bingo, casino,
poker and sports-betting. Branded keywords
are excluded from the dataset, because they
would skew results in favour of big brands.
In total, these 210 keywords generate more
than three quarters of a million search queries
every month (767,190 to be exact). Figure 1
shows that the sectors casino and bingo have
bigger search volumes than poker and betting.
The average cost per click (CPC) of these
keywords is £18. AdWords CPC prices are an
indication of the commercial value of traffic
from a keyword. This is true regardless
whether traffic is paid or organic. Figure 2
shows that the average CPC of casino
keywords is outrageous, hitting almost £35.
The rest hovers around £10.
Combining CPC and volume, we can calculate
how much it would theoretically cost to buy
the organic traffic on AdWords. The total
figure is £23,308,401. More than 23 million
Pounds Sterling every month. More than half
comes from Casino. As can you can see in the
table below
NR OF KEYWORDS
TOTAL TRAFFIC AVERAGE COST PER CLICK
VALUE OF TRAFFIC
BINGO 30 219,800 £ 13.76 £ 4,476,047
CASINO 60 247,000 £ 34.93 £ 14,978,809
POKER 60 145,750 £ 9.83 £ 2,066,491
SPORTS-BETTING 60 154,640 £ 10.79 £ 1,787,055
GRAND TOTAL 210 767,190 £ 17.84 £ 23,308,402
Figure 2: Average CPC values (UK) by sector
219800
247000
145750 154640
BINGO CASINO POKER SPORTS-BETTING
Monthly Volume (UK)
Figure 1 Monthly Search Volume (UK) by sector
13.76
34.93
9.83 10.79
BINGO CASINO POKER SPORTS-BETTING
Average CPC (UK)
THE WEBSITES By sector During the 17 months of data analysed, more
than ten thousand (10,683 to be exact) different
URLS ranked in the top 20 positions. These URLS
belonged to 4378 different domains. This report
compares data on the level of domains because
this is the relevant level of detail for most
businesses.
The ‘domains’ in figures 1 and 2 show there are
more different domains and URLS in casino. As
this chart shows the domains we see over time, it
suggests that domains rank for shorter amounts
of time on casino keywords, before they are
replaced by others. It seems that competition is
higher. This makes perfect sense when learned
that the Cost per click of casino keywords is 3
times higher than others.
You may notice that the Domains and URLS do not
add up. The reason is that some domains and
URLS will rank for keywords from multiple
categories. The difference is small though, about
8%, and 12% for URLS. This shows how most
websites focus on one sector within the iGaming
industry.
The ‘normalised’ metric shows how many domains and urls there would be if there were 60 keywords for Bingo,
instead of 30, assuming linear extrapolation.
NR OF KEYWORDS
DOMAINS DOMAINS (NORMALISED)
URLS URLS (NORMALISED)
BINGO 30 537 1074 1282 2564
CASINO 60 1859 1859 3396 3396
POKER 60 1242 1242 2811 2811
SPORTS-BETTING
60 1126 1126 3237 3237
GRAND TOTAL 210 4378 5003 10683 12209
Figure 3: Number of domains per sector (normalised)
1074
1859
12421126
BINGO CASINO POKER SPORTS-BETTING
Number of domains (normalised)
2564
3396
2811
3237
BINGO CASINO POKER SPORTS-BETTING
Number of URLs (normalised)
Figure 4: Average CPC values (UK) by sector (normalised)
By Category Not all sites are the same. In the iGaming search
ecosystem, the two relevant types of sites are
the operators and affiliates. Operators provide
payment facility and provide access to the
games. Although they normally do not host or
own the games, customers recognize the
operator brands as the entity they interact with.
Affiliates make their money delivering new
customers to the operators. For many affiliates,
Google traffic is their major source of income.
Figure 5 shows there are roughly 8 affiliates for
every operator in the top 20 search results. Sites
in the ‘other’ category are for example
Wikipedia, and Facebook. They also take a
significant part of the search results.
DOMAINS URLS
AFFILIATE 2890 5789
OPERATOR 366 1800
OTHER 1056 2975
GRAND TOTAL 4312 10564
affiliate67%operator
8%
other25%
Domains
Figure 5: domains by category
By Size In Search engine optimization, there is a
difference between small and large sites. Large
sites rank more easily on a large number of
phrases due to their authority.
To determine size, MajesticSEO.com’s Trust Flow
metric is used. Trust Flow measures how many
backlinks from trustworthy sites a domain has.
This metric is found to correlate well with total
organic traffic. Using Trust Flow, our definition
of size not only includes traffic volume and
incoming links, but also a measure real world
trustworthiness.
The cut off point for small sites is a Domain Trust
flow of 20. Higher than 20 is considered large.
Trust flow is distribution according to a power
law, this means that the top 25% of sites will have a trust flow higher than 20. As shown in figure 6, in
the top 20 iGaming search engine results, there are similar amounts of large and small sites.
DOMAINS URLS
LARGE SITES 1982 7118
SMALL SITES 2330 3446 GRAND TOTAL 4312 10564
Large sites46%
Small sites54%
Domains
Figure 6: domains by Size
By Category & Size
Finally we will drill down to the combinations
of size and category. We differentiate between
large affiliates, small affiliates, large operators
and small operators. This chart shown leaves
out the ‘other’ sites which are not so relevant
in the commercial iGaming ecosystem.
Figure 7 shows how few operators there
actually are compared to affiliates. And also
how many big affiliates there are.
DOMAINS OPERATOR AFFILIATE GRAND TOTAL
SMALL 250 971 1221
LARGE 116 1919 2035
GRAND TOTAL 366 2890 3256
large affiliate
30%
large operator
8%
small operator
3%
small affiliate
59%
Domains
Figure 7: domains by category and size
PART 2: Understanding Risk
In part 1 we looked at the landscape of
important iGaming keywords, and highlighted the
difference between the sectors bingo, casino,
poker, and sports-betting. We also looked at the
differences between operators and affiliates, and
compared small to large sites.
Part 2 gives insight into the risk of being hit by
an update that causes you to drop significantly.
Because the commercial value of ranking for
some keywords is so high, every company
‘playing’ in this space is exposed to the risk of
losing rankings due to unnatural link profiles.
Understanding this risk is a requirement for
managing it.
Risk of being hit
We use two metrics to assess the levels of risk. The first is ‘risk of being hit’
by an update penalty but staying in the top 20. The second is risk of
disappearing from the top 20.
Figure one shows how the risk of being hit by an update has almost doubled
since January 2012.
The red line (actual observations) is spikey, showing that actual amount of
sites being hit fluctuates. The amount of sites during the last two months is
at an all-time high. This shows how Google is tightening its algorithm to
fight webspam.
The black dotted trendline (linear regression) shows that chances of being
hit went from 4% to almost 8% in 17 months. Its R squared value is over 0.5.
This means that the trend fits the data reasonably well. We can therefore
assume that this trend will continue. Your risk of penalty increases roughly
3%* every month.
* ( (8 %- 4%) / 17 months) / 8% =3.125%. The latest value is slightly below 8%, but this is a rough estimation only.
R² = 0.5136
0.0%
1.0%
2.0%
3.0%
4.0%
5.0%
6.0%
7.0%
8.0%
9.0%
10.0%
Risk of being hit
Risk of being hit
As proxy for getting a being
hit by an algo update or
penalty, we measure the
number of URLs that were
14 or higher previous month
that drop 6 or more
positions, but remain in the
top 20.
Such a big drop is not a
normal event. Probably, you
received a penalty, or an
algorithm update devalued
your links. The root cause is
the same. Your rankings
were kept buoyant by
spammy links. And Google
corrected that error.
T
Figure 8: Risk of being hit over time
Risk of disappearing
Figure 10 shows that the risk of disappearing (Blue line)
for the top 20 has fluctuated between 15% and 20%
during 2012, but in 2013 it has seen a stronger upswing.
The dotted trendline (linear regression) shows a very slow
increase over time. However, the R squared value of 0.23
suggests not a great fit with the data. This means that it
appears hard to predict the future risk of disappearing
from the past 17 months.
However, when we zoom in and focus on only on 2013,
the picture changes as you can see in figure 9. The linear
regression line has a R squared of 0.97. This means that
the data is almost a perfectly straight line. It seems that
Google has increased the number of URLs that are
dropped from the top 20 every month. The number of
URLS that disappear grows by a staggering 12% a month.
This data, in combination with Google’s commitment to
fighting webspam suggests that the growth will continue.
However, at some point it will have to slow down,
otherwise rankings would totally change every month.
Risk of Disappearing
This metric is the % of sites that in the top
last month, and disappeared from the top
20 this month.
URLS disappear for multiple reasons,
including being replaced by another of the
same domain. However, a significant
amount is likely due to penalties.
R² = 0.9709
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
1/1/2013 2/1/2013 3/1/2013 4/1/2013 5/1/2013
Risk of dissaparing since January 2013
R² = 0.232
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30% Risk of disappearing
Figure 9: Risk of disappearing since January 2013
Figure 10: Risk of disappearing
Risk of Penalty by Sector Which sectors are the most risky to operate?
Figure 11 shows that casino is the most risky
sector, closely followed by Bingo, while sports
betting and poker are much less risky.
When we analyse change over time in figure 12,
a Bingo has a very strong increase last month.
This coincides with the latest penguin 2.0
algorithm update. Further, the chart shows that
the lines that were close together in the first half
of 2012 are drifting apart. Poker and sports
betting are not increasing a lot in risk, while
casino and bingo do.
6.5%
7.2%
4.9% 4.9%
BINGO CASINO POKER SPORTS-BETTING
Risk of being hit
Figure 11: Risk of being hit by sector
Figure 12: Risk of being hit by sector
0%
2%
4%
6%
8%
10%
12%
14%
16%
Risk of being hit
Bingo
Casino
Poker
Sports-betting
Risk of disappearing by Sector
Figure 13 shows that Casino is again the most risky, and
interestingly, sports betting is second.
When we look at figure 14, the rising trend identified in
the previous section seems to hold for all four sectors.
None of them escape Google’s intensified pruning of
link profiles.
In terms of the amount of risk, casino is clearly more
risky than the other three, which seem to be quite
equal, with sports betting lowering its risk in the recent
months.
In short, based on this section, and the previous. It
seems that casino is squarely in Google’s scope for
penalties. This is not surprising given the value of its
traffic, as shown in Part 1 of this report (figure 2).
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
Risk of disappearing
Bingo
Casino
Poker
Sports-betting
Figure 13: Risk of disappearing by sector
23%
27%
21%24%
BINGO CASINO POKER SPORTS-BETTING
average risk of disappearing
Figure 14: Risk of disappearing by sector over time
Risk of SEO by category When comparing affiliates, operators and ‘other’ sites, figure 15 shows the risk of being hit by an
algorithm updated. From the regular spikes, it appears that affiliates have high risk to be hit. Operators
have been spared mostly, but that has changed in the last few month. This change is reason for
operators to have a good look at their backlink profile.
The risk of disappearing shows an equal upward trend for all three types of sites. However affiliates risk
is significantly higher than operators. It is also rising faster. Here it seems that the affiliates are the one
who have to worry.
0%
2%
4%
6%
8%
10%
12%
Risk of being hit
affiliate
operator
other
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
Risk of dissapearing
affiliate
operator
other
Figure 15: Risk of being hit by category of site over time
Figure 16: Risk of disappearing by category of site over time
Risk of SEO by size Large sites are defined as having a MajesticSEO.com’s Trust Flow higher than 20, and small sites 20 and
lower. Figure 17 shows how historically small sites had higher risk, but the figures for large and small
have been converging. Now they are similar.
Figure 18 shows how small sites have a much higher risk of their URL’s disappearing from the top results
than do large sites. However much of the recent growth in risk is accounted for by the large sits, with
the small sites stabilising.
0%
2%
4%
6%
8%
10%
12%
14%
Risk of being hit
large
small
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
Risk of dissapearing
large
small
Figure 17: Risk of disappearing by category of site over time
Figure 18: Risk of disappearing by category of site over time
Conclusion
This report looked at 2 complementary metrics of risk in iGaming SEO and found significant evidence of
increasing risk. Both metrics have been increasing over time. Risk of being hit had a stable growth since
2012 and the risk of disappearing has seen strong growth since the start of 2013. Both metrics are at an
all-time high in the last month.
Based on these trends, and knowing Google’s commitment to fighting webspam, we can make the
prediction that there will be an increasing number of sites that will lose an important portion of its
rankings in the near future. These will be the sites whose link profile has a large portion of ‘spam’ links.
The risk will be higher if you are a casino or bingo site, and if you are an affiliate, although operators risk
exposure is catching up quickly with affiliates. Size still matters, but not as much as it used to.
The Recent penguin 2.0 update is reflected in the data, as the risk values are at their all-time high.
However, the more important notion here is that penguin was not a dramatic change from the trend.
Instead, it seemed to fall within the expected range of values. This suggests that the named updates
serve a Public Relations (PR) function, and their actual efforts to curb webspam happen on a more
incremental basis.
What can you do to reduce your risk? If you know your link profile is ‘bad’, you can anticipate reduced
rankings in the near future. To correct for this, you might decide to go heavy on the high end content
creation and outreach to close gap with links that are not considered ‘spam’. This is an expensive
exercise.
Ultimately, careful planning will help ensure a stable growth and spend efficiency.