Looking for SEO Advice After a Difficult Start - New Project Now Live

[OnlineCasinosLounge]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share my experience and hopefully get some advice from SEO specialists in the community here at GPWA.
In the past, I spent a significant amount of time and money building what I believed was a high-quality affiliate website. I also invested heavily in SEO through an external agency. Unfortunately, although things started well, it later became clear that the agency lacked real experience in the iGaming niche. My site was eventually flagged for keyword stuffing, most of the pages were deindexed, and today only the homepage remains live.

As you can imagine, this resulted in a major loss of time, money, and motivation.
After that setback, I decided to start fresh together with a colleague. At the moment, it’s just the two of us working on the project step by step. Our new site has been live for about one month, and so far everything looks stable and healthy.
We are now focused on doing things the right way from the beginning.

I would greatly appreciate any tips, best practices, or guidance from experienced SEO professionals in the affiliate/iGaming space, especially regarding:

• Safe long-term SEO strategies
• Content approach for new sites
• Link building in competitive niches
• Common mistakes to avoid
• How to build authority from scratch

If anyone is willing to share advice or point us in the right direction, it would mean a lot.


Thank you in advance for your time and support.

[chaumi]

OK, had a look at your site and you've made a reasonable start. But there's a lot missing. You should look at SEO as a holistic exercise - which is a way of saying there are multiple aspects/elements, all of which are worth consideration and attention.

Because of the scale involved, I don't have time to start trying to type it all out. But...if you don't get what you need off this thread, drop me a PM and we can work out a way to talk. I'll run you through some stuff you can do in the short - medium - long term that should help.

[OnlineCasinosLounge]

Thank you for taking the time to review our site, we really appreciate it.

We fully agree that SEO is a holistic process, and we’re committed to improving all aspects step by step. Since this is a new project after a difficult experience with our previous site, we want to make sure we build everything correctly from the start.

Any guidance on key priorities for the short and medium term would be extremely valuable for us. I will also send you a PM as suggested to discuss further.

Thanks again for your willingness to help, it means a lot.

[wonderpunter]

Pretty much all SEO is irrelevant now, since the last few updates everything has changed radically and yous should focus more on the new techniques..sure some old sites with long time authoeiry are ranking, but from what i have seen they are all decreasing this feels liek a transation period where people are still tryign to finding thier feet. including myself

[chaumi]

You've got incoming PM's disabled on your account, so can't reply. You can either enable it or get me on Telegram @SteveRMG

[PaulEchere]

Hey, what you had there is unfortunately the case when dealing with most "agencies" - not all of them, of course.

I would have gone over this but I see that you've already connected with chaumi, who should be pretty well positioned to give goo advice.

On the link building side, I can share some bits and best practices that are applicable specifically to the igaming niche, in case you need that feel cfree to ping me directly.

[SweetJackpots]

Sorry to hear that, but to be honest this is more common in iGaming than most people admit. A lot of generic SEO agencies simply don’t understand how sensitive and competitive this niche really is.
If I had to give one core piece of advice for a fresh start, it would be this: slow down the scale and control everything in-house as much as possible. Especially content.
Keyword stuffing usually happens when someone tries to “force” relevance instead of building topical authority naturally. For a new domain I’d focus on building clean content clusters around tightly related topics rather than chasing high volume money terms too early. Let Google understand what your site is about first.
For link building, I’d avoid sudden spikes. In competitive niches it’s tempting to push hard early, but unnatural velocity combined with over-optimized anchors is often what creates problems long term. Brand anchors and natural mentions go a long way in building trust signals.

[Cleverbetlabs22]

If you are targeting a GEO that enforces igaming sites to shut down, heavy DMCA complaints etc, I suggest to treat domains as temporary assets. However, if you are focused on a GEO where you can operate legally, having a solid white hat SEO strategy should be the goal for long-term gains.

[iso2009]

I am working on my first casino site, and took a look at onlinecasinoslounge com, which I assume is your current project.

Many of your backlinks are very low quality. I'm seeing lots of posts on very shady sites, probably expired domains registered without any due diligence and filled with tons of spammy articles. I suspect this is part of your SEO strategy?

Not sure how old your domain is, but it has already 1200 indexed pages in google. Let's assume it is 4 months old. 1200+ pages pushed to the index in such a short time, in a niche where you don't need so many pages (you're not covering sports seasons, for example), seems like you're already in the google's spammy zone and unlikely to recover.

At this point, with spammy backlinks and too many pages pushed to the index, your content (which I think it's good) and your UI/UX doesn't matter anymore from a SEO perspective.

In my opinion, a clean approach would be:

1. don't get any backlinks for a month or two, then slowly start building only good backlinks.
2. don't push too many pages into the index when you go online, it's pointless and you'll be indexed and ignored (spam).
3. you already used keyword anchors instead of pure url or branded kw. Big mistake.

[topcaz]

For me the website is not loading, I would recommend to focus on the hosting issues as well

Agree with previous comments, the rules in iGaming SEO are changing now, and will be changing next 1-2 years as well. The new strategies will arise. For me there are 2 options:

1. Properly created content with AI will start ranking more and more
2. AI created content , that will eventually be properly classified will be 100% down, and only real editorials will rank

Both of the options will rewards in case you bet now on one of them, and continue working without looking much on short term gains.

This is sort of Black/Red roulette now, without 0