How to Rank iGaming Websites in 2026 (James Dooley Interviews Charles Floate)

James Dooley: iGaming SEO in 2026.

With regards to the search engine results page, it is a pretty crazy industry at present. So with regards to iGaming SEO, what is working in today’s algorithms?

Charles Floate: Black hat.

Unfortunately, it is pretty much all black hat all day long. Even if you get your white hat SEO to work, you will more than likely be negative SEOed by one of the black hats anyway and removed from the SERPs. The several negative SEO techniques that are working very well right now include DMCA takedowns, which are probably the number one cause of sites being removed.

James Dooley: So if you have a white hat iGaming website and you are ranking number one for a big keyword, someone will black hat it and take it down?

Charles Floate: Yes, 100%.

James Dooley: Via what method?

Charles Floate: Right now, it is a DMCA takedown.

There is a specific portal where you can submit a DMCA notice to Google saying that a page on the internet is infringing on your copyright. That system is automatic, so it will automatically remove a page from the SERPs. However, it does not even matter if there is a piece of violating content on there or not. In most cases, there is no copyrighted content or copyrighted material on there. Google will just automatically remove it. Then you can appeal and two weeks later you will get reinstated. However, for that two-week period, even if they reinstate you on day seven, it can still take another seven days to be fully reinstated back into search. In some cases, we are seeing operators in iGaming deal with hundreds of DMCAs every single day, sometimes even on the same URL. They are DMCAing the same URL 20 times per day. It is just a continual effort to remove and suppress pages from Google. So even if you are doing all the white hat SEO in the world, you are still going to be affected by the black hats anyway.

James Dooley: I hate the negative SEO strategy.

Charles Floate: Yes. I think it should be patched by Google. It needs to get patched very quickly.

James Dooley: Staying completely away from any sort of negative SEO, what can people do to win?

What are people doing differently in iGaming to help them win? I hear a lot of people talking about virality. A lot of people want to build backlinks, but many are doing some sort of virality campaign. Does virality work, and is that a great play to use within the iGaming sector?

Charles Floate: Yes. Viral boosting, CTR manipulation and those kinds of things work fantastically well if you can do them properly.

The majority of people in iGaming and the majority of SEOs are not going to be able to do CTR manipulation properly because there are so many factors involved. Number one, you need the correct geo. If you are trying to rank in the UK, you want UK IP addresses. Number two, those IP addresses need to be clean. They cannot be bots, VPNs, IPs that Google is blocking or IPs that Google thinks are spam or negative. If you are continually using botted IP addresses that result in negative IPs, you can effectively negative SEO your own page by doing that CTR manipulation. You need geo-specific IPs, they need to be clean, and they need to be timed well. If you have a keyword with 600 searches per month and you send 600 clicks per day through Google, it looks manipulated and negative, and it can cause the page to drop. You need to make sure you have the correct geo, clean IP addresses, and that it is spread across the correct period of time. Some people even take time zones into account so they are not sending loads of clicks at 4am or 5am. They try to make clicks come through during peak hours, which removes some of the negative effect it can have.

James Dooley: There are other viral campaigns where people use pop-under traffic through platforms like PropellerAds, PopAds and TrafficStars, and they do it through Twitter redirects.

The issue is that they get 5,000 hits instantly, but they are all under two seconds. They may trigger an instant boost, which was in the Google leak, but the long-term Navboost metrics then send negative signals. Even if it gets the short-term boost and jumps from position seven to position one, it becomes like crack cocaine. They want more of it. Then 72 hours later, when it drops back down, they rerun it again. They send another 5,000 hits through Twitter, Chrome browsers or Android, and it works until the whole site drops. From the perspective of trying to rank a website in the iGaming sector, it feels like people need to do it, but long term it affects the overall 13 months of Navboost signals. Once they use pop-under traffic, it seems to affect them long term. It always seems to be short-term gains in the iGaming sector. Let’s move away from the website because it is difficult to build a website long term and rank it. A lot of people are now using aged domains to rank, but again, that is short term with repurposing aged domains. With regards to aged domains, what are people looking for in an aged domain to rank in the iGaming industry?

Charles Floate: In general, niche relevancy used to be a big part of looking at aged domains.

Right now, it is root authority and trust signals like a Google Business Profile. You want to make sure it was a real business and a real entity, and that it is trusted by Google. It is about maintaining the equity the domain already had. That is why expired domains, dropped domains and drop-catch domains tend not to be as powerful as aged domains. They tend to lose that equity. Google is a domain registrar, and they can very quickly see if there is an issue between the domain being dropped and then being picked up and used for something else. That comparative anti-spam system stops those from working. With aged domains, it is the trust layer, the authority layer and maintaining the equity.

James Dooley: With regards to parasite articles, using third-party high-DR sites to try to get rankings, the content needs to be good quality, semantic, NLP-optimised and full of useful information.

Are there any specific domains people should be looking for? Does the domain need to be niche relevant if they are looking to get “best casino sites in Canada”, for example? Or does relevance on the domain not really matter?

Charles Floate: It depends on the SERP and the niche.

If you are trying to rank for iGaming keywords, it does matter to some extent. But for most keywords, Google’s systems do not always treat relevance as strictly as they used to. Five or six years ago, Google’s anti-spam systems were much more aggressive and probably would have picked up a lot more than they do today. Now a lot of them have been switched off, devalued, or the processing power has been moved into AI research and AI teams. You can get away with a lot more now than you used to be able to.

James Dooley: When you write this article on a third-party DR90 site, and you create a listicle with your brand in position number one, are you looking to power that up with tier twos or virality to the parasite article?

Charles Floate: A lot of the time, we are using CTR manipulation for the parasite article.

With backlinks, it depends on the niche and whether the query is competitive enough to need them. A lot of the time, we are using other parasites to link to the parasites, then interlinking and allowing them all to rise up together.

James Dooley: Is that where people talk about daisy-chaining the parasite articles together?

One links to another, which goes to another, and there is a circuit. Once you power up one, it powers up the whole chain. With regards to wider iGaming strategies, what else are people doing that is working very well?

Charles Floate: There is a bunch of stuff with the canonical trick, subdomains and domains that are not relevant to the geo.

Previously, you could not rank a Greece domain in the UK. A lot of those domain-level systems at Google seem to have changed. Now you can rank certain domains that are not geo-specific in other geo-specific areas. In general, right now it is the canonical subdomain trick, PBNs, link spam, aged domains and negative SEO. Those are the big strategies.

James Dooley: With regards to subdomains, I have always been told that a subdomain is treated as a different website to the root domain.

Charles Floate: Yes.

James Dooley: However, now a lot of people say they are working really well because you still get the brand and trust of the root domain.

You are able to put casino dots or betting dots onto it. They are treated as different websites, but an exact-match subdomain is an exact-match subdomain. You can pass power down and start powering up each subdomain. Do you feel that is a better strategy than the canonical, or is it just one of those where you try all things?

Charles Floate: I think if you combine certain techniques together, you will get a better effect than having one technique by itself.

If you can combine the subdomain with the canonical, CTR manipulation and PBNs, you will rank much higher than someone just doing one of those by itself. Subdomains specifically used to be treated as their own individual domain, effectively separate from the main domain. But Google seems to have changed some of the way the algorithm treats them. You do seem to be able to get some of the trust and validation from the root domain on the subdomain. Most people in iGaming are using the canonical method on an aged domain, pointing that canonical to the subdomain, then firing tons of spam through the canonicalised aged domain. That points at the root domain, and the canonical tag effectively acts as an anti-spam 301, which allows you to use much higher levels of spam than a traditional 301 would.

James Dooley: Let’s say someone watching this is in the iGaming industry and says, “Charles, I need to rank my website. I have had it for five years. I have a brand.”

They only want to do white hat strategies, and you cannot say leave the industry. What can they do to push the boundaries and compete in certain industries? They could be in bingo, betting, online slots or casino. Maybe they avoid the big terms where they are likely to get DMCA takedowns and go after the really long tails. What traditional SEO strategies are working today that could help them still get FTDs and at least get a wage out of the iGaming website they have?

Charles Floate: Topical authority is still massive.

Most iGaming sites, especially if they are doing slots, games and things like that, do not have anywhere near the level of content they could have. You can generally get away with having much higher content depth, much higher accuracy and better information. Google will prefer to see that, even when competitors are using black hat techniques. The problem is that consensus in the SERP is not just at a content level. Consensus also becomes a domain and technique-level issue. If there are a bunch of blog posts ranking in the SERPs, Google tends to prefer another blog post coming into the top 10. That means if there are a bunch of black hats ranking canonical subdomains in the SERP, Google is going to expect another canonical subdomain to come into the SERP, not a white hat site. That is the big issue. However, you can pick up tons of long-tail keywords. There are small game searches, celebrity searches, sports betting queries and lots of other opportunities. Creating deeper content can help you pick up mass amounts of long-tail traffic. You need to make sure the technical SEO and on-page SEO are sorted so that the site is properly structured and equity can flow between hubs and down from hubs into those long-tail pages. That is how you can win the bigger race. With that being said, you need to make sure the content is not thin. You should not just create pages for the sake of adding a page for a 10-search-per-month query. It still needs to maintain the overall quality score of the website.

James Dooley: For sure. Anyone watching this who is in the iGaming SEO sector, whether you are building a casino site, bingo site, betting site, poker site or anything similar, leave a comment in the comment section.

Let us know what is working for you in the iGaming industry. Charles, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.