Results of Our Work
During a 7-month collaboration, our team added 80 outreach links to the client’s backlink profile, all from genuine Spanish media covering sports, finance, and lifestyle. Every single site was hand-picked by our team and signed off by the client. Here’s why we took this approach.
About the Client
A Spanish comparison platform in the iGaming space came to us. Its core product is reviews and ratings of DGOJ-licensed casino and betting operators. The company has been running for two years and focuses exclusively on the Spanish market. Its monetization model is affiliate commissions from operators. The team behind the project is 8 people strong, with no in-house SEO specialist. Here’s what brought them to us:
- Royal Decree 958/2020 had effectively shut down most advertising channels and made it much harder to acquire new users.
- Around 70% of the 190 referring domains were PBNs and directories with zero traffic.
- Every new domain had to be approved manually, since regulators hold the operator responsible for affiliate traffic.
That’s exactly why the client decided to stop working with freelancers and find a partner with real experience in restricted niches.
Project Goals
During our first consultation, we agreed on the scope of work with the client: audit the link profile and disavow affiliate PBNs, run a gap analysis against three leading Spanish iGaming portals, and build a list of 80 donors with a genuine Spanish audience. Every domain had to be approved by the client, we didn’t move forward without that sign-off.
The next block of work covered the placements themselves. We needed to build an anchor plan with no more than 12% commercial anchors, then check attributes and indexing after publication, and set up monthly reporting.
Our Step-by-Step Process
In Spain, a site can turn you down before it even sees your terms, simply because of the iGaming niche. So promising the client specific domains upfront would have been dishonest. We deliberately built a shortlist much bigger than the target and published on 80 out of 130 domains. That kind of buffer isn’t optional in this market.
Head of Outreach, NeedMyLink
1. Auditing the Existing Profile
We started with an audit. All 190 referring domains went through Ahrefs and Moz, then we manually reviewed the suspicious ones. We found signs of affiliate networks on 43 sites: shared Class C IPs, identical footers, similar registration dates. After a closer look, 12 domains stayed in the profile, and 31 went into disavow.
We separately flagged what we call “the ballast”: 62 directories named closely to “mejores casinos online” with zero traffic. Google doesn’t treat them as spam, but they don’t affect the growth either.
2. Competitor Analysis
Next, we ran a gap analysis against the three biggest Spanish iGaming portals. We found 240 domains linking to competitors. After filtering by GEO-targeted traffic, that number dropped considerably.
Turns out 40% of the donors in competitors’ profiles had nothing to do with gambling at all. They were Spanish media covering sports, personal finance, and lifestyle. That’s exactly what shaped our selection strategy: instead of competing for spots in niche directories, we went where the Spanish audience already was.
3. Building the Anchor Plan
At the anchor-planning stage, the client wanted an exact-match anchor “casino online España” on 30% of links. We pushed back and showed them domain profiles that had been filtered out precisely because of aggressive anchor text.
We agreed on a different split instead: 62% branded anchors with URL, 26% mixed/diluted anchors, and just 12% partial-match commercial anchors. That last category only went on sites that don’t flag content as sponsored.
4. Selecting Donors
For a target of 80 placements, we built an extended shortlist of 130 domains. That buffer comes down to how this market works: in iGaming, not every site will agree to work with you, so you always have more candidates than you actually need. On top of that, the client personally vetted every domain. It stretched out the timeline, but no questionable site made it into the profile.
5. Writing Content
Spanish editorial teams know exactly what they will and won’t publish, and listicles like “Top 10 Best Casinos” don’t make that list.
So we wrote to match what each outlet actually wanted: how La Liga betting markets work, responsible gambling guides, how winnings are taxed in Spain. These are topics that interest the average Spanish reader, whether they gamble or not. Articles ran 1,300–1,600 words, depending on each donor’s requirements.
We brought in our own Spanish-speaking copywriters to write the articles, so we didn’t run into any problems with the content. Every piece met the editorial team’s expectations on the first draft. On top of that, every article went through our internal checks for grammar, plagiarism, and AI detection.
6. Link Placement and Reporting
Once an article went live, we logged the link attribute, anchor accuracy, and where the link sat within the body copy. If anything didn’t match what we’d agreed on, we went back to the editorial team for fixes.
We then submitted each page for indexing via the Google Indexing API. Reporting was tracked link by link: donor URL, post URL, anchor text, screenshot, Ahrefs metrics as of the publish date. The master dashboard was updated every two weeks.
Final Thoughts
iGaming in Spain is a niche where half the work happens before the first link even goes live. Audit, gap analysis, geo-traffic filtering, domain approvals – only after all that does the actual outreach begin.
Donor drop-off is inevitable here, and you need to plan for it from day one. Out of 130 shortlisted candidates, 80 made it to publication. In the end, over 7 months, the client walked away with a profile of 80 links on sites with a genuine Spanish audience, a world away from the networks they started with.
Nik Zakharchenko, CBDO of NeedMyLink
