The evil duo: non-Gamstop casinos x parasite SEO
As safer gambling takes its place centre stage in the white-labelled iGaming market, a worrying rise in non-Gamstop casino promotions is emerging, often driven by parasite SEO tactics. What are the ethical, legal and reputational risks for affiliates? We spoke to a search consultant, a player protection expert and a gambling lawyer to find out.
The UK’s Reform Party might be most famous for its flamboyant leader Nigel Farage and its anti-EU stance. However, in a bizarre twist, its former political entity, the Brexit Party, which existed before the 2021 rebrand, has seemingly become the face of unregulated online casinos. On the site’s about page now is a proud declaration: “Welcome to thebrexitparty.org, your dedicated source for discovering and understanding the world of non-Gamstop casinos for UK players”.
It’s not only Farage’s old site that’s experiencing an identity crisis. A quick Google search for “non-GAMSTOP casinos” reveals pages hosted on hospital, school and charity domains recommending offshore operators to players who’ve registered for the national self-exclusion scheme. What is going on here?
An unfortunate surge
According to Martin McGarry, owner of a soccer stats site and a search consultant, the culprit behind the mass hysteria is once again parasite SEO – the main target of Google’s Site Reputation Abuse policy launched last year. Unlike mainstream media sites, which typically have genuine partnerships with licensed iGaming companies, these non-Gamstop pages are usually hosted on expired domains, often without the original owners knowing they’ve been repurposed.
“The method they use now is to find expired domains with strong backlink profiles. At the moment, any old site with a decent backlink profile can be reused. For a short time, Google ranks them highly. They achieve instant visibility because of their domain history,” he explains.
Purchasing these domains doesn’t break the bank either. As McGarry observes, a site with nearly 80,000 backlinks can be bought at auction for as little as £5,000, making it easy to replicate non-GAMSTOP pages and attract mass traffic.
We probably don’t even know the real scale of the business. There might have been hundreds of attempts we never see
Martin McGarry, SEO consultant
“We probably don’t even know the real scale of the business. There might have been hundreds of attempts we never see. It’s called a churn-and-burn process. They produce as many as they can and burn through them fast,” McGarry says.
Simon Vincze, head of sustainable and safer gambling at Casino Guru, agrees with McGarry and adds that he’s seen a clear surge in non-Gamstop casino affiliate sites in recent years.
And it’s not just a British problem. Vincze says the same trend appears in every country with a national self-exclusion scheme. Just days after Germany launched its OASIS programme in 2021, he noticed a swarm of local affiliate sites already ranking for “non-OASIS casinos”. The scale of promotion has also moved beyond the web, reaching users through direct messaging. One of the worst cases he’s seen involved affiliates sending SMS offers.
If you stop and think about the fact that you are making someone’s life worse, that alone should be enough to make you stop
Simon Vincze, head of sustainable and safer gambling at Casino Guru
“There are email and phone number lists floating around in the industry. Searching for non-Gamstop casinos is one thing, but getting a text that says ‘here’s a casino not on Gamstop, and here’s £100 to gamble with’ creates a real urge,” he says.
Noting that those who sign up to self-exclusion schemes are usually struggling with addiction, Vincze believes the moral risk of promoting non-Gamstop casinos is significant: “If you stop and think about the fact that you are making someone’s life worse, that alone should be enough to make you stop.”
A criminal offence
While exploiting regulatory loopholes and targeting vulnerable players are certainly unethical, many may still assume that it exists in a legal grey area. But according to John Hagan, co-founder of gambling law firm Harris Hagan, that’s a dangerous misconception.
“In short, if you’re advertising a non-Gamstop casino which is accepting play from Great Britain, you are essentially committing a criminal offence, and that is punishable by imprisonment, a fine or both,” Hagan says.
In spring 2020, the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) announced that all licensed operators must participate in GAMSTOP or risk losing their licence. Under Section 330 of the Gambling Act 2005, advertising unlawful gambling services is illegal, whether done remotely or in person. Affiliates cannot dodge these rules simply by choosing a global domain extension.
If you’re advertising a non-GAMSTOP casino which is accepting play from Great Britain, you are essentially committing a criminal offence
John Hagan, co-founder of gambling law firm Harris Hagan
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re using a ‘.com’ or a ‘.co.uk’. If you’re advertising a non-Gamstop casino in a way that’s intended to reach people in Great Britain and the casino is accepting their play, then you are breaking the laws,” Hagan explains.
“Each country’s regulations are different. But I’m fairly confident that any regulator around the world with a self-exclusion scheme will find it abhorrent if affiliates are actively targeting people trying to self-exclude and will prioritise enforcement as best they can,” he adds.
An ongoing battle
As Hagan notes, the UKGC has the power to issue cease and desist notices to illegal operators and affiliates. It also collaborates with international bodies such as Google and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to remove unlawful content.
In a research paper published last October, the Commission outlined its methodology for identifying illegal affiliate pages, including monthly monitoring of search terms like “not on Gamstop”. The first five pages of Google results are collected “to ensure the majority of traffic is captured”. At the 2025 ICE World Regulatory Briefing, UKGC CEO Andrew Rhodes revealed a tenfold increase in URL takedowns. Between April 2024 and January 2025, the regulator asked Google to remove 64,000 sites from UK search, with 264 domains taken down completely.
Still, Hagan acknowledges the illegal gambling market is vast, and enforcement remains an uphill battle. While Google’s parasite SEO crackdown should help reduce non-Gamstop content in theory, McGarry believes the platform “hasn’t got a proper handle on it yet” and that algorithmic detection is unlikely to improve any time soon.
“There’s only a tiny margin between what counts as parasite content and what’s considered legitimate content, so at the moment, Google’s only defence is manual takedowns. When it comes to parasite SEO, it’s extremely hard for Google to write an algorithm that stops it altogether,” McGarry explains.
If an affiliate wants to build a lasting website, they need to know that big brands, especially tier-one operators, won’t want to work with them if they’re associated with shady practices
Simon Vincze, head of sustainable and safer gambling at Casino Guru
In 2022, Vincze tried to influence the industry by using Casino Guru’s safety index ratings to pressure operators listed on non-Gamstop pages. But communication proved difficult, with some brands immediately denying any involvement. In the end, he paused the project out of concern that removing the more cooperative operators would only leave the worst actors and scammers dominating the top search results.
He warns affiliates of the reputational damage that comes with promoting non-Gamstop casinos: “From an industry’s view, if an affiliate wants to build a lasting website, they need to know that big brands, especially tier-one operators, won’t want to work with them if they’re associated with shady practices.”
In this whack-a-mole game between regulators and the iGaming black market, Vincze believes responsible affiliates still have a role to play through player education. While it might be impossible to block every non-Gamstop casino, they can “teach people why it’s not good for them before they go looking for the next loophole.”
Ultimately, as the UKGC ramps up its efforts to tackle unlawful gambling, the non-Gamstop epidemic may eventually slow. The commission’s next steps, as outlined in its research, include expanding detection to slots streaming sites like Twitch and Kick and crypto trading platforms. It is also calling on white-label iGaming companies to help close the loopholes and to improve its detection methods. As the saying goes: grasp all, lose all. It seems affiliates should steer clear of the muddy water, as chasing short-term gains in the SEO shadows could cost them everything in the light.