GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 31 - February 2015

Who is trusted? The easiest way to become a winner is to copy other winners. So it's really impor- tant to be able to find winners easily. Charts Before I go into the data, I will hold my hands up and say this is a very, very high level overview and it only scratches the surface when it comes to the complexities of ranking algorithms. All I'm trying to demonstrate is the big disconnect between referring domains and how well you do on search. Of course there is onsite optimization, which will have an effect. But generally when you look at the data on a graph, the expected patterns aren't really there, i.e., more links, higher rankings. The Data I did a sweep of the U.K. gambling land- scape for casino, stripped all non-gam- bling domains and organized the list by cost of traffic, according to SEMrush. That means that results on the left-hand side get the highest “cost of search traffic” and the ones on the right-hand side get the lowest “cost of search traffic.” (See Bar Graph A.) The blue bars represent the number of re- ferring domains with a trust flow of over 15 and the gray bars represent the trust flow for each of the websites. The black line represents the “cost of search traf- fic” according to SEMrush. A big cost of search traffic means a site gets lots of valu- able search traffic. You see the iGaming operators dominate, especially Paddy Power. And in every graph like this I've done, the pattern is al- ways the same, with a fewwebsites taking the lion’s share of search prominence. FYI: Trust flow is a metric that Majestic uses to help interpret the quality and volume of the links going to a site. Cost of search is the cost per click x keyword volume x ranking, aggregated to give a monetary number. Because SEMrush only tracks 106 million keywords, it misses on a lot of longer tail phrases. There is a very loose correlation between getting more good links and more search visibility. But for every site that sort of correlates, there are another 10 that don't. In other words, there isn't really a clear pattern. Here is the same graph covering iGaming operators but zoomed in so you can see individual brands. (See Bar Graph B.) Notice how many operators there are. And here are the top casino affiliates based on SEMrush data. Again it's the same story, with a small number of sites dominating. (See Bar Graph C.) You can see how some sites have virtu- ally no referring domains like simons- blogpark.com and manage to do all right, whereas freeslots.com has had to get 30 times more referring domains to COVER STORY Bar Graph A Trust and trust optimization: The new SEO discipline