I save traffic by checking my work.

The Spanish operator lost 70% of its traffic overnight. It’s not because of a Google penalty. It’s not because a competitor has got higher ranking than them. They did it to themselves with the Disavow Tool.

Here is what happened. They had a gambling site based in Madrid with a good number of links to it. Someone on the team said that it was a good idea to stop “bad” links from showing up. They said that 2,000 links were not theirs. The problem was that the links came from forums about Spanish gaming, business directories from Portugal and publications about the industry. As soon as Google processed the file, the rankings dropped.

The lesson is brutal and simple. Disavow does not improve your ranking. It is nuclear medicine. In 2026, iGaming link profiles will be under more scrutiny than ever. It will be important to know when to use them and when to leave them alone. This will be the difference between surviving the next update and losing a lot of traffic.

The problem with link profiles is something nobody wants to discuss.

Let’s be honest about the iGaming space for a second.

Casino and betting sites attract spam backlinks like a pub attracts a Friday night crowd. It’s just part of the job. You will see folders that haven’t been updated since 2019. PBN links from offshore agencies. Your website has been hacked and people are using it to access your website. People writing articles as guests on websites that have no visitors and no interest in the topics.

Most people who use the machines do not check. They assume their agency is handling it. And often, the agency built some of those links in the first place.

Remember that the March 2026 core update had a bigger effect on affiliate sites than on any other category. We found that 71% of the websites we were monitoring had their search engine rankings drop. The update came two days after a spam update finished, and this was planned. Google removed manipulative link signals first, then checked quality again without them.

If your backlink profile looks like it was built to trick search engines rather than earned through real authority, you are exposed.

A guide to spotting a toxic link without panicking

You don’t need a PhD in link forensics to do a basic check. You just need twenty minutes and a bit of common sense.

Get your backlink report from Ahrefs or Semrush. Sort by DR 0-10. If more than 30% of the websites that send people to your site are in that range, you have a problem. It’s not a serious problem, but it’s something we should check out.

Check how your anchor text is spread out. If your top anchors are all exact match keywords like “best online casino Ireland” or “top betting sites,” that is a warning sign. Natural link profiles have variety. Branded anchors, URLs, mixed phrases, the odd generic “click here”. If all the links use the same commercial phrase, it looks unnatural.

Look for sudden increases. If you gained 500 links in a week and cannot explain why, someone is building spam links to your website. It might be a competitor. Maybe it’s an agency you hired a few months ago that’s still doing the job. You need to know either way.

But the Spanish operator made a mistake here. They saw links of poor quality and thought they had to disavow everything. What they actually said they did not agree with were links from small Spanish gaming forums with real audiences. A link from a Portuguese gambling blog that gets 100 visitors is better than a link from a random authority site every single time. It’s more important to understand the situation than to focus on the numbers.

As people who often play this game will know, the Disavow Tool should only be used in two situations: if Google tells you that you have a manual penalty for “unnatural links”, or if you suddenly get hundreds of links from porn sites or illegal gambling networks, which clearly show that you are being spammed. If you’re worried about anything else, you might be overreacting.

If you have never checked your links in Google Search Console, watch this short video. It shows you exactly where to click to download your link list and what the Disavow tool actually looks like. Watch how the process works so you know what to look for on your screen. Just remember: knowing how to upload a disavow file does not mean you should do it right away. Look at your links first.

What part have you played in this situation?

This is where self-management stops being a buzzword and starts being a skill that you need to survive.

If you wait for an agency to audit your backlinks, you’re essentially waiting while Google indexes junk. You are waiting while the spam links pile up. You are waiting while a competitor tries to make your website less popular, but nobody notices.

Google Search Console gives you the data for free. The Links report shows you the pages that link to your site, the sites that are linking to your site, and the most common words used in the links. You can see which websites are linking to you. You can spot the ones that look like they were built in a basement in 2018 and have never been used since.

You don’t need to check it every day. Once a month is enough. But you need to look closely. The Spanish operator would have realised their mistake before hitting ‘disavow’ if someone had just opened the report and asked a simple question: do these links look right?

It’s better to be fast than to be perfect.

The Spanish operator lost 70% of their customers in just one day. It took months to recover. The number of visitors to my site dropped for the first two months after I asked Google to remove my site from their search results. It wasn’t until the third or fourth month that things started to stabilise.

This is what happens when you make a quick decision that turns out to be wrong. But there is a problem with not doing anything while spam links build up. Google’s systems are better at filtering out noise than they used to be, but they are not perfect. In a competitive field like iGaming, your rivals won’t be waiting for you to figure things out.

The middle ground is simple. Make sure you check your links every month. Know what normal looks like for your site. If something changes, it’s best to check first before doing anything. Don’t take down a link just because it’s low quality. Stop using it because it is having a negative effect on your website.

That is the difference between managing yourself well and damaging yourself.

The most important point

Your backlink profile is not something you can just hand off and forget. It’s a living thing. It changes. Other people add links to your website without asking. Old directories get damaged over time. New spam networks appear overnight.

The Spanish casino site learned this the hard way. They tried to fix a problem that wasn’t there, and in the process, they made a real problem.

You have Search Console. You have eyes. Use them. Look at your links before someone else does something you cannot undo with them.

Because in 2026, the sites that survive are not the ones with the cleanest link profiles. They are the ones who actually looked.