Tier-2 Poker: Recovery After Google Penalty + 31% Growth

Starting situation

The site received a manual action from Google for “unnatural inbound links” in February 2024. Until that moment, it had been working steadily for ~5 years with traffic of ≈45k/month. After the penalty - a collapse to 6k/month in 2 months. The previous SEO team massively purchased links through exchanges in 2022-2023 - a typical toxic profile for iGaming.

What did you do

• Month 1: full audit of the link profile - 3,200 links analyzed, 1,800 marked as toxic. Disavow file submitted.
• Month 1-2: content pruning - 35% of pages with thin/duplicate content were removed, the rest were rewritten under E-E-A-T (author blocks, sources, regulatory links).
• Month 2-3: reconsideration request with a detailed report on the actions performed. Manual action was filmed in week 12.
• Month 3-7: rebuilding the link profile only whitehat - guest posts on poker themed sites, mentions through digital PR.

Result

• Manual penalty removed 12 weeks before
• Organic traffic restored to pre-penalty level by the 6th month
• +31% to the pre-penalty level by the 7th month (≈59k/month)
• Restructured link mass with DR distribution 30/40/30 (high/mid/low) - resistant to future Google updates

What is important to understand

Penalty recovery is the most complex type of project in iGaming. There is no guarantee that reconsideration will take place. The affiliate model here meant sharing the risk: fixed retainer × 50% + bonus when removing the penalty. This gave the client confidence that we are interested in the real result, and not “carrying out a contract.”