What happened with Winzino.com?

We started to analyse Winzino.com.
This was of particular interest as back in June 2017 the site had very little visibility. In fact in June 2017 the rankings were very similar to where they are now. However, from July 17 to November 17 rankings and visibility increased significantly.

The graph below shows estimated traffic levels based upon visibility and rankings.

As the chart shows traffic and rankings increased and peaked in October 17 and from this point they began to decline once again until they’ve reached a similar level to where they started; although probably a little improved.

We found this type of performance increase and decline in a relatively short space of time unusual, so we looked a little deeper.

Some of the search terms that had seen the most significant improvements related to ‘no deposit’. For example there are approximately 14,000 phrase match searches that contain ‘no deposit bonus’; winzino.com went from position 26 on Google.co.uk in July 17 to position 1 by September 2017.

Prior to, and during this period, we can see that the site ran a no deposit promotion with a landing page. Unique content is important, but in our experience this should not explain why the site jumped from page 3 to the top of page 1. The page is definitely going to play a part as you can’t expect to rank for something if you don’t have a landing page.

We analysed the link profile and found that one month prior to the increase in visibility and rankings there was an influx of links which happened over a 4 month period. This increase in links (shown in the chart) does follow a similar pattern to the curve in the estimated click chart above.

An analysis of the links shows that in general there is nothing nefarious happening; the vast majority of the links are from affiliates and affiliate networks – so nothing unusual for igaming. Notwithstanding this the pattern of the backlink profile and the timing would suggest that this may have played a part in winzino.com gaining those high rankings. As the influx of new links continued over a period of months the rankings appear to have improved and then fallen away when the activity receded; or the search engines decided to discount the value of those links.

Based on our experience and analysis in the sector we believe affiliate links have no bearing on rankings and that they were dealt with by the search engines, but maybe something has changed.

As far back as 2012 Google’s Matt Cutts said the following on affiliate links,

We handle the vast majority of affiliate stuff correctly because if it is a large enough affiliate network we know about it and we handle it on our side.

Of course we’re talking about organic optimisation so there will always be many other potential factors at play. Key factors include domain age, legacy issues, link history, site structure and Google updates to name a few; these areas and more all play their part in how well a site ranks with search engines.