Why the gambling affiliate industry is still buying links by a number Google has never used

For years, one number has had an outsized influence on the gambling link-building economy: Domain Rating.

A casino review site has a DR of 60? Good site, premium price. A DR of 20? Barely worth the email. Link brokers price inventory by it. Agencies filter prospect lists by it. Affiliate managers approve link budgets partly on the strength of it, alongside Ahrefs’ close cousins — Moz’s Domain Authority, Semrush’s Authority Score.

There is one fundamental problem with all of this: Google has never used any of these metrics, and has said so on the record for years.

What Google has actually said

This isn’t a matter of interpretation. Google’s John Mueller has addressed it directly, more than once, in terms that don’t leave much room to argue.

Asked in 2019 whether a traffic drop was linked to a fall in Domain Authority, Mueller replied: “We don’t use domain authority; that’s a metric from an SEO company.” In 2020, asked whether it affected crawling, he was blunter still: “Google doesn’t use Domain Authority at all when it comes to Search crawling, indexing, or ranking.” He’s made comparable statements about domain-level “authority” signals generally, including in a Reddit AMA where he rebutted the idea outright.

DR is Ahrefs’ metric. DA is Moz’s. Authority Score is Semrush’s. Each is a private company’s own estimate of backlink strength, built from that company’s own crawl of the web — which is a fraction of what Google itself indexes. They correlate weakly with rankings, because backlinks correlate weakly with rankings; independent analysis by Onely found the correlation coefficient between DR and top-10 position sits around 0.14, which is to say: present, but nowhere near decisive.

None of that makes DR useless. It’s a reasonable proxy for backlink volume, and a fast way to triage a prospect list. What it isn’t is a Google signal, and pricing a link — or an entire content deal — as though it were one is optimising for a number Google itself doesn’t recognise.

2019 and 2020

Years John Mueller stated on record that Google does not use Domain Authority for crawling, indexing or ranking

26 August 2026

Date Derek Perkins reported Google’s link-rewriting change had reached near-100% rollout, confirmed by Google the same day

28 August 2026

Date Ahrefs displayed a live notice acknowledging disrupted ranking data

A DR 60 casino site is not necessarily a strong casino site

The gap between the metric and the reality is nowhere more obvious than in gambling link building specifically, because gambling is one of the most aggressively gamed verticals in SEO.

Imagine an agency offers a link from a DR 60 site into your operator review page. On paper, that’s an attractive number.

But look past it. Does the site actually rank for anything commercially relevant to gambling — casino reviews, bonus terms, betting markets? Does Google send it meaningful organic traffic for those terms, or for anything at all? Does it carry genuine editorial links from recognisable publications, or from a long tail of link-farm domains built for exactly this purpose? Is its content indexed regularly, or has it stalled? And — the question that actually matters commercially — would a real bettor ever land on this page and trust what it says?

Often the honest answer is no on every count, while the DR number still reads as impressive. That’s not an accident. Raising DR and equivalent scores is its own small industry, and gambling money has funded a lot of it: reciprocal link rings, PBNs seeded across unrelated verticals to look organic, and the exact multi-niche pattern any experienced affiliate manager will recognise on sight — a site publishing about casinos, cryptocurrency, garden furniture, VPNs and dog food on consecutive days, because the domain exists to move authority, not to inform anyone.

“Google never said DR mattered. It also never said we’d get to keep watching our own rankings. Both assumptions just turned out to be wrong at the same time.”

Google is now making the number itself harder to check

This is where it stops being only a buyer-beware problem and starts being a structural one, because at the same time operators and affiliates lean on DR as a shorthand, Google has spent the past year making third-party tools’ access to real ranking data measurably more expensive.

The pattern is documented, dated, and — as of the last week of August 2026 — confirmed by Google itself.

September 2025. Google eliminated the num=100 search parameter, which had let tools pull 100 results in a single request. Overnight, every rank tracker and SEO platform needed ten requests to do what one had done before. Semrush confirmed the tenfold operational cost increase publicly within a day. AccuRanker responded by limiting tracking to the top twenty results. SISTRIX discontinued some of its desktop tracking entirely. Ahrefs restored full top-100 tracking about six weeks later, without disclosing how.

December 2025. Google sued SerpApi, a company that scrapes and resells Google search results to other tools, under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, alleging SerpApi bypassed Google’s “SearchGuard” anti-bot system at scale. Google’s own blog post on the suit was explicit about the stakes: “We did this to ask a court to stop SerpApi’s bots and their malicious scraping.” It’s worth noting the case hasn’t gone entirely Google’s way — in July 2026 a federal judge dismissed the core DMCA claims, and litigation is still active, with a hearing scheduled for late September 2026.

Late June through August 2026. Independent researchers — Alex Greenland, then Brodie Clark of the SERP Alert newsletter, then Derek Perkins, founder of the rank-tracking firm Nozzle — separately began documenting that Google was quietly rewriting search result links. Instead of a normal URL sitting behind each result, links were resolving through a google.com/goto?url=... passthrough address that can’t be decoded without following the redirect. On 26 August 2026, Perkins reported the change had reached near-100% rollout across the residential IP ranges his tool monitors, and Google confirmed it the same day.

Asked for comment, a spokesperson told Search Engine Roundtable: “We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.” Google did not name rank trackers, AI tools, or any specific category of software as the target — a deliberate vagueness that’s worth registering as such, rather than reading Google’s actual intent into it. What practitioners in the field have concluded, based on the pattern and the timing rather than any Google statement, is that this closes the last easy path to reading a results page without Google’s cooperation.

The practical cost, according to Perkins: resolving every link on a single five-page ranking now takes between 500 and 1,000 individual requests, because HEAD requests are blocked and each redirect has to be followed in full. Rate limits, not bandwidth, become the constraint.

If your own rankings, or the rankings of a site you’re evaluating for a link buy, look strange right now, this is plausibly why — several major tracking platforms flagged unusual volatility through the same window, and Ahrefs itself displayed a live notice acknowledging disrupted ranking data on 28 August 2026, two days after Google’s confirmation.

0.14

Correlation coefficient found between Ahrefs Domain Rating and top-10 Google ranking position, per Onely analysis

10x

Increase in operational cost for rank-tracking tools after Google removed the num=100 search parameter, per Semrush

500 to 1,000

Individual requests now needed to resolve every link on a single five-page ranking, per Derek Perkins, Nozzle

Various, as reported in the article

Why this matters more than a technical footnote

Put the two threads together and the position gambling affiliates are in comes into focus.

Metric one — DR — was never Google’s number to begin with, and buying links against it has always meant paying for a proxy rather than the thing itself. Metric two — actual keyword rankings, as measured by the tools the whole industry relies on to plan and report — is now measurably harder and more expensive for anyone outside Google to observe accurately, with costs that compound each time Google makes a further change.

Neither trend is gambling-specific. But gambling absorbs both harder than most verticals, because so much of iGaming affiliate spend has been built on exactly the workflow this undermines: price a link off a third-party score Google doesn’t use, then justify the spend with a ranking report pulled from a tool that’s now paying ten times more, in requests if not in cash, to produce a number that may already be stale by the time it reaches a client deck.

This sits alongside something we wrote about recently on the operator side: bet365, Rank Group brands and SBK stripping tracking from custom promo codes unless a user clicks through a direct affiliate link first, right as Google’s AI Overviews remove the click that tracking used to depend on. Different mechanism, same direction of travel. Whether it’s an operator deciding a custom code no longer earns an affiliate credit, or Google deciding a rank tracker no longer gets a clean look at page ten, the affiliates and publishers who built their businesses on measurable, attributable value are the ones absorbing the cost of both changes at once.

What this means for how you should actually spend

Stop treating DR as a proxy for whether a link works. Before paying for one, do what a DR check can’t: search Google directly for the terms that matter to your market, and see whether the site actually appears. Check whether it ranks for its own brand name. Look at whether its strongest backlinks come from recognisable editorial sources or from the same rotating cast of link-farm domains every gambling SEO eventually learns to recognise. Ask whether a real bettor would ever plausibly land there.

And hold your ranking data itself to the same scrutiny you’re now applying to DR. A tracker’s numbers depend on how that tool is coping with the access restrictions above — whether it’s discarding pages it can’t parse, resolving them at a cost it’s quietly passing on to you, or reporting positions gathered under a different method than it used a year ago. Two platforms disagreeing sharply on where you rank this month is not necessarily your site’s fault.

None of this fits into a single number between 0 and 100. That was always the appeal of DR — it made something genuinely complicated look simple. But a link’s value was never really the number next to the domain. It was whether a real customer, searching for something real, would ever find it and trust it enough to click.

That was true before Google made the number harder to check. It’s more true now.

DR 60

A high Domain Rating score

A private metric from Ahrefs that Google has said repeatedly it does not use for ranking, crawling or indexing.

0.14

Weak correlation with rankings

Onely’s independent analysis found only a weak link between DR and top-10 position.

10x

Cost of tracking real rankings

Semrush confirmed a tenfold rise in the cost of pulling ranking data after Google removed the num=100 parameter.