iGaming SEO Strategies Working 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 get negative SEO’d by one of the black hats anyway and be removed from the SERPs. There are several negative SEO techniques working very well right now, with DMCA takedowns probably being 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.

Basically, there is a specific portal where someone can submit a DMCA notice to Google saying that a page on the internet is infringing on copyright. That system is automatic, so it will automatically remove a page from the SERP. However, it does not even matter if there is 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. For a two-week period, you can have a page or pages on your website removed. 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 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 negative SEO as a strategy.

I think it should be patched by Google very quickly. But with regards to 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 obviously want to do backlinks, but a lot of people are doing some sort of virality campaigns. Does virality work, and is that a great play 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. It takes several layers. 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. They cannot be VPNs. They cannot be IPs that Google is blocking, and they cannot be IPs that Google thinks are spam or negative. If you continually use botted IP addresses, that can result in negative IP signals. You can effectively negative SEO your own page by doing CTR manipulation badly. You need geo-specific IPs, they need to be clean, and they need to be timed well. If you have a keyword that gets 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 framed across the correct period of time. Some people even take time zones into account so they are not sending loads of clicks at 4:00 a.m. or 5:00 a.m. They want clicks coming through during peak hours because that removes some of the negative effect.

James Dooley: Then there are other viral campaigns where some people use pop-under traffic, whether that is PropellerAds, PopAds or TrafficStars.

They are doing it through things like Twitter redirects. The issue with that is they get 5,000 hits instantly, but they are all under two seconds. They trigger what I believe is instant boost, which was in the Google leak. But long term, Navboost metrics are going to send negative signals overall. Even though they get the short-term boost and jump from, say, 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 visits through Twitter, Chrome browsers or Android, and it works again. It works until the whole site drops down. From 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’ worth of Navboost signals it is collecting. Once they are doing this pop-under traffic, it seems to affect them long term. So it always seems to be short-term gains within the iGaming sector. Let us 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 try to rank, but again, that can be short term, and they are 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. It needs to be trusted by Google and maintain 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 because Google is a domain registrar and can quickly see if there is an issue between the domain being dropped and then picked up and used for something else. That kind of comparative anti-spam system stops those from working as well. With aged domains, it is about the trust layer and authority layer maintaining the equity.

James Dooley: With regards to parasite articles, using third-party high DR sites to get rankings, with good quality semantic content, NLP optimisation and all the right information, are there any specific domains people should be looking for?

Do they need to be niche relevant if they are looking to rank for “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 seem to care as much. To some extent, I think five or six years ago the anti-spam systems that Google had were much more aggressive, and they probably would have picked up much more than they do today. Now, a lot of those systems have been switched off, devalued, or the processing power has been moved into AI research and AI teams. You can get away with much more now than you used to be able to.

James Dooley: So, when you write an article on a third-party site, it is a DR90 site, you have the article there, you have a listicle, and you put your brand in position number one.

Are you looking to power that up with tier twos or any sort of virality to the actual 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. We are basically interlinking them and allowing them all to rise together.

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

One links to another, which links to another, with a circuit going round. Then once you power up one, it powers up the whole chain. With regards to overall iGaming strategies, what else are people doing that is working very well?

Charles Floate: There is a lot of stuff with canonical tricks, 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 canonical tricks, subdomain tricks, PBNs, link spam, aged domains and negative SEO. Those are the big six.

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 like gangbusters because you still get the brand and trust of the root domain, and you can put casino dots or betting dots onto it.

They are treated like different websites, but an EMSD is an EMSD. You can still pass the power down and power up each subdomain. Do you feel that is a better strategy than canonical, or is it just a case of trying everything?

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

If you combine the subdomain with the canonical, CTR manipulation and PBNs, you will rank much higher than someone only doing one of those things. Subdomains specifically did used to be treated as their own individual domain, separate from the main domain. But Google seems to have changed some of the way the algorithm treats them. You do seem to still get some of the trust and validation from the root domain through the subdomain. Most people in iGaming are using the canonical method on an aged domain. They point that canonical to the subdomain, then they fire loads of spam through the canonicalised aged domain, which points at the root domain. That canonical tag is effectively acting like an anti-spam 301, which allows you to use a lot more spam than a traditional 301 would.

James Dooley: Let us 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? They could be in bingo, betting, online slots or casino. They might decide not to go after the big terms where they will get DMCA takedowns, and instead go after long tails. What traditional SEO strategies are working today that might still get them FTDs and at least allow them to make money from the iGaming website they have?

Charles Floate: I would say topical authority is still massive.

Most iGaming sites, especially if you are doing slots and games, do not have anywhere near the level of content they could have. You can generally get away with having much higher levels of content depth, accuracy and information. Google will prefer to see that, even if competitors are using black hat techniques. The problem is that consensus in the SERP is not just at a content level. Consensus also becomes domain-level and technique-level. 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 more likely to want another canonical subdomain to come into the SERP, not a white hat site. That is the big issue. However, you can still pick up loads of long-tail keywords. There are little game searches, celebrity searches, sports betting queries and many other options. Creating deeper content can pick up a huge number of long tails. You also need to make sure your technical SEO and on-page SEO are sorted, so 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 that content is not thin. You cannot 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 and building out a casino site, bingo site, betting site, poker site or anything like that, leave a comment in the comment section. Let us know what is working for you in the iGaming industry. Charles Floate, it has been an absolute pleasure.