Gambling com Group Partners with Independent co.uk

Looks like the "Authority for rent" strategy is still in full force, with Gambling group prepping to post content on Independent .co.uk soon:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/ho...he-Independent

They'll undoubtedly own many UK serps with the usual "5 Football Betting Sites" or "Best Tennis Betting Bonuses" sponsored posts.

If they see a lengthy future with this strategy (also rolling out across the USA), I have two questions:

1) Will their own portal sites remain viable?

I imagine yes (to a lesser degree) until the sponsored posts lose rankings. Worst case scenario, backlinks from these big news sites to their own portals will be extremely helpful and less likely to get devalued.

2) What will Google do about it?

I sincerely thought buying placements on other sites was a big No-No :). Now, it's a multi-million dollar cottage industry. At this point, I'm not sure Google will/can do much about it without potentially devaluing big sites that generally provide useful news to their readers.

Then again, as I've whinged about before, it should be fairly easy to determine the principle purpose of a website (news) and its areas of expertise (news) and adjust its ability to rank content outside its main purpose (eg, coupons, gambling, toaster ovens, cell phone reviews).

After a while, big affiliates will skip building websites and just rent pages from a major news site, taking a small cut in potential profit with much less overhead.

Best of all for news publishers, they apparently don't need US state gaming licenses. Again, very surprised regulators allow their licensees to refer customers from 3rd parties who didn't have to go through the licensing process.

Since Google treats these 3rd party projects as "good as gold" and not as standalone subdomains starting from scratch, I got a hard time seeing any changes in the foreseeable future. It's just a basic news folder category from the high authority site in Google eyes right?

I think licenses are of no interest to Gambling com, especially since they have a huge number of offshore casinos.

As for whether their portals will remain profitable.

On the one hand, high traffic, probably associated high earnings....and rising high costs, a lot of people who are behind it.
All of this makes it likely to be profitable, but looking at the costs of such portals, not necessarily.

Certainly most GPWA users set up their websites for quite a different purpose than being so big and all that comes with it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Casino Magnus

Since Google treats these 3rd party projects as "good as gold" and not as standalone subdomains starting from scratch, I got a hard time seeing any changes in the foreseeable future. It's just a basic news folder category from the high authority site in Google eyes right?

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Yep, that's the "status quo" treatment from Google. But the same could be argued for anyone who buys a few "sponsored posts" on a high authority news site. "It's just a gambling section we helped build for them" :)

Agree, I don't see it changing immediately, though it should be easy to filter. Hate to see Google become "newsweb".