Clickout Media sites (Gambling Insider, etc.) hit by Google penalties

[QuantumNomad]

Came across an interesting investigation https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/clic...evived-with-ai

According to the report, Gambling Insider has reportedly been hit by Google's manual penalties related to parasite SEO

While Clickout Media officially denies owning some of these websites, employees claim otherwise, identifying Esports Insider, CasinoBeats, Gaming America and PlaySense as part of its network.

Interestingly, I have a project with a direct dofollow backlink from Gambling Insider. And personally, I find the whole situation rather suspicious.

I had the opportunity to work with Gambling Insider about a year and a half ago, and I can say that getting any kind of cooperation with them (let alone securing a backlink) was extremely difficult, almost impossible. And it wasn't about money. They had a very strict vetting process for potential partners. What's more, the link to our project was actually obtained free of charge. At least back then, they seemed to be extremely selective about any advertising or commercial placements on their website.

That's why the current reports are particularly surprising to me. It's hard to reconcile my previous experience with what appears to be happening now. Anyway, I don't know... for some reason, I can't shake the feeling that there might be some competitors pulling the strings behind the scenes.

And what's strange! Despite the article reporting that Google penalties were imposed around a month ago, that project is currently experiencing quite a strong boost in organic traffic. So far, I haven't noticed any negative impact - quite the opposite, actually.

It makes me wonder whether we should be treating backlinks from penalised websites as a serious SEO risk, or whether the impact is much less straightforward than it might seem. Perhaps it's still too early to draw conclusions. I'd be interested to hear what others are seeing.

[wonderpunter]

The have plenty more. until google seals the canoncial 301, parasite, scaled content domain abuse etc it will just keep going. nothing will change. if you look at most igaming results now it's almost always garbage spam sites or content ranking.

[abidseo]

I would not treat one link from a penalised site as a serious risk on its own, and I would not rush to disavow it either. In my experience Google usually just devalues a link when the linking site loses trust, rather than passing a penalty on to every site it links to. A single dofollow link is very unlikely to be the reason a site gets a manual action, unless your own link profile is already full of the same kind of links.

What I would check first is the specific linking page, not just the domain. Is that page still indexed, still ranking for anything, and still getting real traffic? If the page is deindexed or the site has been repurposed into thin, AI-generated content, the link is probably worth very little now, but that is a different problem from it being harmful. If the page is still indexed and relevant, the link may still be passing some value even while the domain as a whole is under scrutiny.

A few practical steps I would take:

1. Check your own Search Console for any manual action and for any sudden ranking or traffic change on the linked page around the time the penalty was reported. If nothing changed, there is no urgent problem to fix.

2. Look at the link in context. Is it a natural editorial mention with relevant anchor text, or does it sit in a footer, sidebar or a page that has clearly been sold? Context matters far more than the domain name alone.

3. Keep the disavow file as a last resort. Disavowing a relevant, editorial link because of a news report can cost you more than it saves. I would only disavow if the site turns into an obvious link farm, starts linking out to unrelated spam, or if you see a pattern of similar risky links building up.

The wider point in the thread is the real lesson here. If a large part of your profile depends on a small number of big media sites, one penalty or one change of ownership can quietly remove a lot of value. That is why I would rather spread links across genuinely relevant, smaller sites as well, and keep checking the linking pages over time instead of assuming a link keeps its value forever.

[wonderpunter]

I would not treat one link from a penalised site as a serious risk on its own, and I would not rush to disavow it either. In my experience Google usually just devalues a link when the linking site loses trust, rather than passing a penalty on to every site it links to. A single dofollow link is very unlikely to be the reason a site gets a manual action, unless your own link profile is already full of the same kind of links.

What I would check first is the specific linking page, not just the domain. Is that page still indexed, still ranking for anything, and still getting real traffic? If the page is deindexed or the site has been repurposed into thin, AI-generated content, the link is probably worth very little now, but that is a different problem from it being harmful. If the page is still indexed and relevant, the link may still be passing some value even while the domain as a whole is under scrutiny.

A few practical steps I would take:

1. Check your own Search Console for any manual action and for any sudden ranking or traffic change on the linked page around the time the penalty was reported. If nothing changed, there is no urgent problem to fix.

2. Look at the link in context. Is it a natural editorial mention with relevant anchor text, or does it sit in a footer, sidebar or a page that has clearly been sold? Context matters far more than the domain name alone.

3. Keep the disavow file as a last resort. Disavowing a relevant, editorial link because of a news report can cost you more than it saves. I would only disavow if the site turns into an obvious link farm, starts linking out to unrelated spam, or if you see a pattern of similar risky links building up.

The wider point in the thread is the real lesson here. If a large part of your profile depends on a small number of big media sites, one penalty or one change of ownership can quietly remove a lot of value. That is why I would rather spread links across genuinely relevant, smaller sites as well, and keep checking the linking pages over time instead of assuming a link keeps its value forever.

I really detest the amount of AI slop replies this forum now gets.

[eenzoo]

I was up to say the same. 120 posts from our SEO Paki here alone ... in less than one month.
All same patterns, all practically useless

[wonderpunter]

I was up to say the same. 120 posts from our SEO Paki here alone ... in less than one month.
All same patterns, all practically useless

They need to put a lid on it these AI slop spammers ruin everything. soon it will just be thousands of them spamming each other with ai slop comments and the real posters will be gone.

[cryptocasinoshelp]

I think they aren't the ones doing that. I believe many big sites have lots of "grey" SEO practices. Nothing new or shocking.