Why iGaming SEOs Are Going Back to Manual Link Outreach

Suddenly, you didn’t have to spend hours doing outreach yourself. You didn’t have to rely on resellers where you never really knew who was taking a cut, either. Something that used to require a lot of time and effort became incredibly easy.

But lately, I’ve noticed the pendulum starting to swing back.

When I speak with affiliates and operators, more of them tell me they’re building at least some of their links themselves again.

Why?

The answers vary, but a few reasons keep coming up.

Economics

There’s no getting around this one.

Although link prices seem to have come down considerably lately, marketplaces still take their cut. In some cases, that can be as much as 50%, and I’ve seen mark-ups that are even higher.

It’s also no secret that plenty of affiliates are currently adapting to a very different reality after taking significant hits in Google.

One fairly obvious way to reduce costs is to bring outreach back in-house.

Outreach itself doesn’t necessarily require expensive labour. And in iGaming, where the price of an individual link can be high, the cost of having someone do the outreach can sometimes be recovered after just four or five successful placements.

The maths starts to make sense surprisingly quickly.

Unique links matter more

“Unique links” is almost a strange concept in iGaming, because very few good opportunities stay unique for long.

But that’s exactly why some SEOs are starting to care more about them.

If you discover a golden link opportunity on a marketplace, one thing is almost guaranteed: you’re not the only person who has found it.

If buying that link is incredibly easy for you, it’s just as easy for your competitors.

That doesn’t necessarily make marketplace links bad. But it does mean that a placement secured through your own outreach can potentially be far more valuable, particularly if it’s on a website your competitors haven’t discovered yet.

Interestingly, the people I’ve spoken to who care the most about unique links haven’t stopped using marketplaces altogether.

One affiliate told me that he still likes using them when launching a new website from scratch. You can quickly establish a decent foundation and pick up many of the links competitors already have.

But once you want to separate yourself from everyone else, you eventually have to invest in your own outreach and relationships.

That distinction makes a lot of sense to me.

More control over context, renewals and the actual deal

This is something that has become more obvious now that we’ve had several years of buying links through marketplaces.

The way people build links in 2026 is quite different from how many of us approached it only a few years ago.

Context matters more.

There needs to be a logical reason for the link to exist. It needs to look natural, but more importantly, it needs to feel natural within the article and the website.

When I worked at iGamingToday.com, I was pitched plenty of articles. There was often a noticeable difference between content coming through a third party and content from someone dealing with us directly.

With direct contact, there’s room for a conversation.

You can discuss ideas with the publisher. You get a better sense of what they’re actually interested in publishing and what would look completely out of place on their website.

The outreach process itself is usually different too:

1. You find a website you want a link from.
2. You look at what they’re actually publishing today.
3. You adapt your pitch and try to come up with something that fits.

Compare that with buying through a marketplace.

The workflow can easily become much more transactional. You’re already inside the platform, you’re looking at metrics, and because we all hate dealing with invoices, you might as well add four or five links to the order. Probably more if there’s a volume discount.

You end up shopping for links rather than building them.

And there’s another part of the deal that I think is becoming increasingly interesting: you don’t necessarily just want the link anymore.

Since around 2024, LinkedIn has become increasingly important within iGaming, with more affiliates building a presence there.

You could argue that some of this is simply another vanity metric for those of us working in SEO. Maybe it is.

But if a publisher has a strong LinkedIn presence, getting your article distributed there as part of the deal has value. That’s generally not something included when you buy a standard placement through a link marketplace.

When you’re dealing directly with the publisher, however, you can ask.

“Can you share the article on LinkedIn as well?”

Often, the answer is yes.

You can negotiate the deal, not just the price

The final part is the agreement itself and what happens further down the road.

There are advantages to marketplaces here.

If you’re buying through a large platform and your link disappears, you usually have someone to go back to. Depending on the platform and its terms, you may get a replacement or another form of resolution.

You don’t necessarily have that same safety net when dealing directly with a publisher.

But direct relationships give you other options.

Maybe you negotiate a lower price for a 12-month placement rather than paying for something marketed as permanent. Maybe you agree on several placements over the next year. Maybe you negotiate some degree of exclusivity.

There are simply more variables on the table when you’re speaking directly to the person who owns the website.

Will more iGaming companies bring outreach back in-house?

That’s the interesting question.

I don’t think link marketplaces are going anywhere. They’re simply too convenient, and for smaller affiliates in particular, I think the product most of them offer today is perfectly adequate.

But I do think the marketplaces will have to evolve.

They need to adapt their products to where Google and SEO are today rather than simply making it easier to buy placements. The products probably need to become better, potentially cheaper, and certainly more flexible.

I also wouldn’t be surprised to see some marketplaces move towards more bespoke services.

They already have publisher relationships, data and outreach expertise. Instead of only providing a marketplace where customers choose websites from a catalogue, why not sell access to that expertise?

The marketplace could remain, while outreach becomes an additional managed service for customers who want opportunities their competitors can’t simply find by applying the same filters.

And this is where I think things get particularly interesting.

The problem link marketplaces originally solved was access. They made it incredibly easy to find and buy links. But by doing that, they also commoditised them.

Everyone has access to the same websites.

That’s becoming more of a problem at a time when AI has made it easier than ever to create good-looking websites, decent content and polished UX. The barrier to producing something that looks professional has dropped significantly.

So how do you distinguish yourself from everyone else?

A unique link profile is still one of the ways to do it.

And right now, marketplaces aren’t particularly good at giving you that. By definition, if a link is sitting in a catalogue that thousands of other SEOs can search, filter and buy from, it’s not really unique.

That’s the paradox for link marketplaces.

The easier they make it for you to find a good link, the easier they make it for your competitors to find exactly the same one.