Website of Charlie Gard Foundation now promotes gambling for SEO firm
Parasitical SEO companies are buying respected online news outlets in order to harvest their reputations before leaving behind a ruined shell.
One organisation linked to this sort of activity is Clickout Media, which bought a network of UK-based video game sites replacing human writers with AI ‘journalists’ and packing them with links to offshore gambling websites.
Hundreds of websites are believed to have received the same treatment from Clickout Media according to former employees who spoke on condition of anonymity to Press Gazette.
UPDATE: Press Gazette exposé of parasite SEO firm removed from Google results
Sites typically go from being viable outlets, still valuable enough to be bought for large sums, to being filled with AI-written articles and casino links, before simply being abandoned.
Speaking anonymously, one former Clickout Media employee said: “I was moved from site to site. Writing guidelines and strategies changed every other week with very little explanation. At first, I didn’t write casino content, but then I wrote articles on bets and odds. Then AI articles started appearing.”
The owners of one site bought by UK-based Clickout Media said they were approached by anonymous buyers in the first instance.
The organisation has previously bought multiple sites in football and women’s sports (Football Blog, She Kicks, Sportslens, Sportslens UK, Sportscasting UK, Football Blog UK), as well as gambling sites, including Gambling Insider, for which it is suggested Clickout Media paid at least £12m.
In recent days, it appears Google may have removed the site Esports Insider from its index after its takeover by Clickout Media , which some have taken as a sign of a crackdown on what’s known as parasitic SEO, where companies working for casino sites buy up trusted sites purely to leverage their reputation.
Even searching for the term Esports Insider no longer brings up a link to the site, which was once a thriving news outlet employing multiple journalists.
After the Google penalty, the site seems to have laid off multiple staff, with long-time editor Tom Daniels posting that it was “sad to see Esports Insider seemingly close its doors”.
Other Clickout sites such as recently purchased Videogamer also seem to have been de-indexed in recent days, with many staff losing jobs.
A Google spokesperson told Press Gazette: “While we aren’t able to comment on a specific site’s ranking on Search, our policies prohibit publishing content at scale for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings.”
This is a tactic which has even been used to exploit the good name of charities.
The website for children’s cancer charity Charlie Gard Foundation has been turned into a site advertising offshore casinos.
As of this month the charity’s website was hosting content around “Best non-Gamstop casinos in Britain today”, written by a writer called Breno Costa, whose profile image is 100% AI-generated according to Identifai .
Gamstop is a service designed to block problem gamblers from signing up to casinos: ‘non-Gamstop’ casinos, typically hosted in tax havens, enable them to gamble regardless.
Another charity site, Road to Peace, set up by car accident charity Brake, now redirects to online casinos.
What happens when Clickout takes over online newsbrands?
Multiple freelance writers and employees at gambling, tech and football sites have described how their sites were sold to Clickout Media and rapidly transformed into casino review sites.
Sites such as Sportslens.com , She Kicks, Sportscasting UK and Footballblog UK were taken over by Clickout Media in 2023 and 2024.
Sportscasting and Football Blog were rapidly turned into sites entirely about gambling, and featured writers who appear to be generated by AI.
Techopedia is another site that was taken over and content rapidly shifted towards casino reviews and cryptocurrency investment content. It was penalised by Google in 2024 for reputation abuse and now cannot be found even with a search for its name.
Staff working on Clickout Media-owned sites describe being paid as little as $1,200 a month for eight articles per day.
Sites such as Football Blog were converted into casino sites (the site’s front page now has a single large article advertising ‘The best non-gamstop casinos’, written by Alex Toner, a writer whose profile picture is 100% AI according to Identifai).
Employees have described how in the months after takeover by Clickout Media, casino content started to appear on sites.
Some human writers were allowed to continue reporting on their normal niche (which they believed was to preserve the site’s reputation), while others were told to write casino content.
Writers describe being moved from site to site, with sites slowly hosting more and more casino content, and an increasing number of AI profiles and AI-generated content.
In recent months and weeks, Clickout seemingly moved away from a previous strategy of keeping some human writers on to maintain the authority of sites, and towards replacing people wholesale with AI.
The sports sites in the UK are awaiting the arrival of new ‘AI writers’, according to one former employee.
Clickout Media trades as Finixio. In the year to 30 September 2024, the most recent data available, turnover was £40m, although the company declared a loss of £3m and thus paid no tax.
The company was founded by Sam Miranda and Adam Grunwerg, and they are still listed as directors, although several staff suggested they no longer had much to do with the business.
Johann Fenech is believed to be CTO of Clickout Media and Danish SEO expert Kristoffer Holten is also believed to be linked to the business. Press Gazette reached out to both for an interview, but has heard nothing.
On its website, it describes itself as “a PR and marketing agency specializing in Web3, finance, and tech”.
The company rarely makes it clear which websites it owns, although one former employee suggests the list of sites owned by Clickout Media may be up to 300.
Acquisitions at first focused on the casino sector, but Clickout has since diversified into buying sports and videogame websites.
One website owner, speaking anonymously to Press Gazette, said he had no idea it was Clickout Media who had bought his sports-focused site in 2024.
He was approached by an individual who had “little digital footprint”, and made an offer for the site.
The owner said he remembered thinking it was strange, but was happy to proceed if the funds arrived.
The deal was “frictionless” and was rapidly “paid in full”, but the site owner had no idea that he had sold it to Clickout Media.
Others have said that Clickout’s relationship with sites that host its casino content is not always as simple as ownership, and sometimes it partners with sites instead.
Businesses like Clickout buy sites with good reputation to host articles containing links to online casinos which will appear in Google results.
In a 2023 interview , SEO expert Holten explained the business model on a podcast: “The casinos are struggling to get players themselves and they’re all competing. So they want to play individuals like us to get them as many players as possible.
“And the higher the value, the better. So basically it is sending players to the casinos, to the operators, and you get either a fixed fee, a revenue share, a flat fee for even showing them just a banner or something. And that’s the name of the game. And the more traffic you bring, the more money you’ll make.”
Revenue for organisations like Clickout can be up to 35% of the money lost by gamblers, with the casino taking the rest, Holt explained.
The funds are rapidly ploughed into buying up new sites, Holten said.
He said: “Well, obviously there is a parasite part of it. We have the money to invest in parasites. Then we buy up sites. We buy new sites. That’s really lucrative for us, buying up large new sites all the way up to a few million dollars per acquisition, transforming those into casino sites and crypto sites. We’re really successful at that. And that’s obviously something that we’re not the only ones that do this. Every single gambling firm out there does this, but we’re just quicker at doing the transaction, actually bringing money on the table.”
There are several different kinds of parasite SEO, according to independent expert Vince Nero, director of content marketing at BuzzStream.
Nero said: “There are a few degrees of parasite SEO, and it’s not all bad per se. Since sites with higher authority (especially those around for a while) rank more easily for keywords, the game is to seek out sites with high authority and get your content published on them. The articles are typically, though not always, paid placements and usually appear in special sections of the sites or on subdomains.
“The extreme examples are frowned upon not only because it’s considered ‘cheating’ but also because Google can manually issue a penalty to your site. Google has a specific term for when marketers take this too far: ‘Site Reputation Abuse’. When the parasite SEO is clearly manipulative and unrelated to the site’s main topic, that’s when they get into trouble.”
In more extreme cases, instead of creating one-off posts on existing high-authority domains, “marketers simply acquire the domain and publish their content on it. That’s what Clickout is doing”.
The sites Clickout acquires are typically abandoned once Google has penalised them – with Techopedia now returned to being a tech site, but with little on it.
Likewise Sportslens, which cannot be found via a Google search for its name, has simply been abandoned.
Nero said: “Most of these sites are in it for quick wins. They fizzle out pretty quickly; either Google sees it and issues a manual penalty, or Google addresses it through a major algorithm update. I wouldn’t be surprised if this very article leads to a manual penalty for them. Typically, when sites are publicly exposed, Google is pretty quick to act.”
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