A permanent dofollow link from an established Nordic sports statistics site currently sells for between €850 and €1,200, with most transactions clustering around €1,000. That figure is not a market rate in any formal sense — link pricing is opaque, unregulated and negotiated privately — but it reflects what operators in the segment are quoted.
This page sets out what that money buys, what drives the price up or down, and how to assess a site before agreeing to anything. We document the market; we do not sell links and we do not recommend vendors.
Why iGaming link building is priced differently
Link building in gambling costs several times what it costs in most other sectors. Three factors account for the difference, and understanding them is the difference between paying a fair price and paying a naive one. Readers new to the channel may want the iGaming SEO fundamentals first; this page assumes them.
Restricted advertising channels. Google Ads, Meta and most mainstream programmatic inventory are closed or heavily restricted for gambling in most markets. Organic search is therefore not one acquisition channel among many — for a large part of the sector it is the primary one. Demand for ranking concentrates where supply is limited.
Publisher risk. A site owner who accepts a gambling link takes on something a site owner accepting a link from a software company does not: association with a regulated vertical, potential advertising restrictions on their own inventory, and the possibility that the link is later judged manipulative. The premium prices that risk.
Lifetime value. A depositing player in a mature market carries an acquisition value that supports link budgets which would be irrational elsewhere. The price reflects what the traffic is worth, not what the link costs to place.
What a link purchase actually consists of
"Buying a link" covers several different transactions, and the distinction matters because they carry different prices and different risks.
Placement in existing content. A link inserted into an article already published and already indexed. The page has ranking history and, in some cases, traffic. This is generally the most valuable form, because the host page already carries authority — and generally the most expensive.
A commissioned article. The buyer supplies or commissions content, the publisher publishes it with the link included. The page starts from zero. Cheaper, but the link sits on a page nobody has visited.
A resource or directory listing. A link from a list page. Cheap, common, and worth close to nothing — resource pages carry little authority and are frequently discounted entirely.
A homepage or sitewide link. A link in a footer, sidebar or navigation that appears on every page of a site. Sold as high value on the argument that it appears thousands of times. In practice, sitewide links are one of the clearest patterns of paid linking and among the easiest to identify at scale.
Price ranges observed in the market
The figures below reflect what is quoted for permanent dofollow placements. They are observations of a private, negotiated market, not published rates.
| Site type | Typical range (EUR) |
|---|---|
| New or low-authority site, little traffic | 150 – 400 |
| Established niche site, consistent organic traffic | 600 – 1,000 |
| Established Nordic sports statistics site | 850 – 1,200 |
| Regional news or established magazine | 1,500 – 4,000 |
| National news outlet | 5,000+ |
Three points about these numbers.
They are per link, not per campaign. An operator building toward a competitive term in a mature market is not buying one link.
Permanence is priced in. A link sold "permanent" costs more than one sold for twelve months. Whether permanence is honoured is a separate question — see the section on assessing a seller.
Language and market matter more than raw authority. A link from a site serving the operator's target market is worth more than a higher-authority link from a site serving a market the operator cannot accept players from. This is the single most common error we see in link buying: optimising for authority metrics rather than for relevance to the market being targeted. What counts as the target market is not a matter of ambition but of the market a licence actually reaches.
What drives price up and down
Traffic beats authority scores. Third-party authority metrics are convenient because they are a single number, and that is also their weakness. They are calculated from link graphs, not from search performance, and they can be inflated. A site with genuine organic traffic in the target market is worth more than a site with a higher score and no visitors — regardless of what the price list says.
Topical relevance. A link from a page about football statistics to a sportsbook is contextually coherent. A link from a page about garden furniture is not, and no authority score compensates for that.
Outbound link profile. A site that has sold links to twenty gambling operators has a different profile than one that has sold to two. Check what else the page links out to before agreeing.
Placement within the page. A link in the body text of a relevant section carries more weight than one in a boilerplate block at the end. Prices rarely distinguish; the value does.
Anchor text. Exact-match commercial anchors carry more ranking weight and more risk. Descriptive anchors carry less of both.
How to assess a site before buying
Six checks, in the order we would run them.
Does the site have organic traffic in your target market? Not global traffic — traffic from the country whose players you can accept. A site with 50,000 monthly visits from a market you are excluded from is worth nothing to you.
Is the traffic real? Compare estimated traffic against the keywords the site ranks for. If the numbers do not reconcile — high traffic, few ranking keywords — the traffic estimate may be built on terms the site does not actually convert on.
How many outbound gambling links does the page already carry? One or two is normal for a site that occasionally accepts commercial placements. Ten is a page that exists to sell links, and a link from it carries the weight of that context.
Is the content substantive? A 300-word page that exists to host links is a different asset from a 2,000-word article that ranks on its own merit.
Does the site link out to anything questionable? A site linking to unlicensed operators, pharmaceutical spam or adult content is carrying associations that transfer. That is checkable in most cases, because which licensing regime an operator holds determines whether a public register exists to check it against.
Who else is on the page? If the page already hosts links from three of your direct competitors, the placement is neither exclusive nor especially valuable.
What Google actually does about paid links
Google's link spam policies treat links intended to manipulate ranking as violations, whether the exchange involves money, goods or services. The enforcement is of two kinds, and they work differently.
Algorithmic discounting. The link is identified and its value is disregarded. Nothing is announced, no notice is sent, and the operator continues paying for links that do nothing. This is the far more common outcome, and it is invisible from the buyer's side.
Manual action. A human reviewer determines that a site is participating in link schemes. A notice appears in Search Console, and rankings drop sharply. Recovery requires disavowing or removing the links and submitting a reconsideration request — a process measured in months.
Gambling is among the verticals subject to closer scrutiny, alongside pharmaceuticals and financial services. An operator buying links in this sector should assume a higher probability of both outcomes than the general web average.
Patterns that draw scrutiny
Individual paid links are difficult to identify with confidence. Patterns are not.
Anchor text distribution. A natural link profile is dominated by branded and URL anchors, with exact-match commercial anchors as a minority. A profile where a third of anchors are "best online casino" is not a profile that occurred naturally.
Velocity. Forty links in a month followed by nothing for six months describes a purchase, not organic growth.
Footprint across sellers. Sites sharing hosting, analytics IDs, registration patterns or contact details form a cluster. Buying from several sites in the same cluster produces links that all carry the same signal.
Templated placement. Links in the same position, with the same anchor formulation, across multiple sites indicate one operation rather than many independent editorial decisions.
One-way commercial flow. A site whose outbound links all point to commercial gambling destinations, with no editorial links to anything else, describes its own function.
Assessing a seller
The market is private, which means the counterparty risk is real.
Permanence. A link sold as permanent that is removed after eight months has cost full price for two-thirds of the value. Ask what happens if it is removed, and get the answer in writing.
Indexation. A link on a page Google has not indexed transfers nothing. Check that the host page is indexed before paying, not after.
Exclusivity. Some sellers will place competing operators on the same page. Some will not. It is worth establishing which.
Editorial control. If the seller reserves the right to alter the content around the link, the context it sits in can change after purchase.
Payment terms. Full payment before placement in an unregulated private market is a position worth negotiating away from.
The same evidentiary standard applies when the buying is delegated rather than done in-house — which is why how to evaluate an agency's link building claims turns on the same questions as assessing a seller directly.
What the money buys, realistically
An operator spending €10,000 on links at market rate buys roughly ten placements. In a mature market with entrenched competitors, ten links is not a campaign that moves a competitive commercial term.
This is the arithmetic that is rarely presented at the point of sale. Link building in competitive gambling markets is a sustained cost, not a one-time purchase, and the operators who succeed at it treat it as an ongoing line item measured in years rather than months.
The alternative — building an asset that earns links rather than buying them — is slower, and in most cases cheaper per unit of durable authority. It is also the only approach that does not carry the risk described above. Assets of that kind tend to document the thing a reader is actually checking: what a licence means from the player's side is the sort of material that earns citations without a transaction.
Questions worth asking before any purchase
- What is the site's organic traffic in the market I can accept players from?
- How many gambling links does the target page already carry?
- Is the placement in body content or in a block appended for the purpose?
- Is the host page indexed?
- What happens if the link is removed?
- Which of my competitors already have links on this page?
- What anchor text is proposed, and how does it fit my existing profile?
A seller unwilling to answer these has answered them.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a casino backlink cost?
Between €150 and €5,000 or more depending on the site. Established niche sites with genuine organic traffic in a target market typically quote €850 to €1,200 for a permanent dofollow placement.
Is buying links against Google's guidelines?
Yes. Google's link spam policies treat links exchanged for money with the intent of influencing ranking as violations. Enforcement takes the form of algorithmic discounting or, less often, a manual action.
What is the difference between a dofollow and a nofollow link?
A dofollow link passes ranking signals; a nofollow link carries a rel attribute instructing search engines not to. Paid placements are usually sold as dofollow, which is what makes them paid.
Does domain authority matter when buying links?
Less than it is priced as. Third-party authority scores are calculated from link graphs rather than search performance and can be inflated. Organic traffic in the target market is the more reliable indicator.
How many links does a casino site need to rank?
There is no threshold. It depends on the competitiveness of the term, the strength of incumbents, and the quality of the site's own content. In mature markets, competitive commercial terms are held by sites with hundreds of referring domains built over years.
Can links be removed after purchase?
Yes, and it happens. Confirm what recourse exists before paying, and check periodically that placements are still live and still indexed.
Page last reviewed: 2 August 2026