Case 45. iGaming: site for a crash game — 7x growth in the first month of placements and death due to a technical reason two years later (Tier1.shop)

Владислав Бобров (Mdevostator)Article updated: 3 September 2026

Founder of tier1.shop · PBN Specialist, in SEO since 2009

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Case from the Tier1.shop collection · 2026 · ← all cases

Result in brief: 📈 a fresh site for a super-popular crash game (iGaming niche, Kazakhstan) received 62 permanent links in large batches during the first five months — and grew from 53 to 360+ visits/month already in the first month of placements, then maintaining a level of 360–400 throughout the autumn (×7; according to Ahrefs — ×4 with a peak of 46 keywords in the top-3). This is a rare case for the selection with a completed life cycle: two years of life with traffic, dips after the 2024 core updates — and death in the autumn of 2025 for a purely technical reason, unrelated to links. We show everything honestly, including the finale.

Starting point

Website — focused on a single ultra-high-frequency topic: a crash game played "for money," with an audience in Kazakhstan. At the start, the domain was practically empty: the first non-zero month in Semrush was 53 visits (May 2023), with zeros throughout the observation history before that. Meanwhile, the niche is hyper-competitive: for every popular geo-query about this game, there are dozens of clone sites that appear and disappear monthly.

The feature that defined the entire case: almost all demand in the niche is concentrated in 1–2 ultra-high-frequency queries. This means a rapid ascent if you are in the top 3 — and painful swings with every recalculation of the search results.

What was done

From June 19, 2023, the client placed links in large batches: 23 links in June, 15 in August, 4 in September, 20 in October (the majority of the October batch in one day), then a top-up of 11 links in January–February 2024 and a final 3 in September 2025. All 76 links are permanent, and all are to the homepage: unlike cases #43/#44, where links went 1–4 per month to different catalog pages, here the client directed everything to a single point.

Anchor profile — commercial and branded by the game name: "[game]", "[game] casino", "play [game]", "[game] official site", geo-variations. 42 unique formulations out of 76, with repetitions clustered in places — up to 4 identical anchor texts in one day (October batch). Four links are naked URLs.

Dynamics by Semrush (monthly data, Kazakhstan)

• Effect without lag. The very first month of placements: 53 → 361. Then a plateau of 305–397 throughout the autumn. In cases #43/#44 (low-frequency commercial niches), the effect arrived after 4–8 months — here, it took weeks. The difference is explainable: when all demand resides in a couple of ultra-high-frequency queries and the site is fresh and empty, appearing in the top for these queries is immediately visible in traffic. The rotation of iGaming search results also plays a role: banned competitor domains free up spots in the top faster than in "quiet" niches.
• One-time peak 1 202* (December 2023): 3 times higher than the plateau, lasted one month. In December 2024, there is nothing similar (91), so this is not annual seasonality — rather a surge of interest in the game or a recalculation of the estimate. We honestly do NOT include this month in the headline figures of the case: the working result of the campaign is a plateau of 360–400.
• Drops of 2024. The decline happened in steps: 415 (February) → 346 → 216 (April, March core update — confirmed by both services) → 92 by September. Then a year of fluctuations between 18–130. An important feature of iGaming search results that overlaps with any updates: competitor domains here are regularly banned and drop out of the index, and new ones immediately take their place — the search results are constantly reshuffled, and part of the fluctuations (in both directions) is explained by this rotation, not by the actions of the site itself.
• Keywords by Semrush (Kazakhstan): the site consistently had 1–2 ultra-high-frequency queries in the top 3, and 0–1 in the top 4–10. The graph for these buckets is almost a straight line, which is why we build the detailed keyword panel below using Ahrefs, where growth up to 46 keywords in the top 3 is visible.
• Final: September 2025 — the last "live" month (130), from October — zeros. The reason is not links and not Google: see the section on the death of the site.

Ahrefs dynamics (daily data, world)

Ahrefs confirms the growth curve: 45–55 at the start → 193 by December 2023 (×4), a crash in early January 2024 (short-term, about two weeks — Semrush did not see it in the monthly grid; the cause cannot be reliably established), recovery and a plateau of 130–210 throughout 2024. Note the right side: the historical peak of 314 was set by the site on August 25, 2025 — five weeks before its death. The site didn't die from fading away — it died on the ascent.

Keywords in the tops (Ahrefs): from 1–4 to a peak of 46 in the top-3 in November 2023 — at the height of the link campaign. Then a January rollback to 10, a plateau of 14–23 through 2024–2025 — and a crash along with the site. Semrush buckets for this case are uninformative (the site lived on 1–2 ultra-high-frequency keywords in the Kazakhstan database), so we built the keyword panel using Ahrefs.

Why the site died — and why it's not about links

From ~September 30, 2025, the site traffic collapsed from 100+ to 17 in five days and reached zero by November — synchronously across both services. We checked the site technically: DNS is alive, the site still responds via HTTP, but the HTTPS connection is not established — the certificate or configuration is broken. For Google, a site with non-responsive canonical https addresses ceases to exist — which is exactly what happened: a complete drop from the index in a matter of weeks.

This has nothing to do with links: permanent links remained as they were (we verify the placements), the site's link profile is alive. Moreover, according to Ahrefs, the site met the breakdown at its historical traffic maximum. The site owner, apparently, simply stopped maintaining it.

Breakdown of placements: batches, anchors, repetitions

All 76 links led to the home page, so instead of the usual page-by-page slice — a breakdown by placement batches. The right table shows how many times each wording was repeated and with what density.

Separately — all repeated formulations (recalling the context from cases #43/#44: it is not the number of repetitions that is critical, but their density over time):

Role of anchor text: dense repetitions that got away with it

This case is the third data point in our series of observations on repeating anchor text (see cases #43 and #44). Here, the repetitions were the most aggressive of all: «[game]» ×7 over 8 months, 4 of which were on a single day; «[game] casino» ×4 over 3 months; and all of this directed to the same homepage. No penalization followed: the site reached a plateau and held the top-3 for its queries for a year and a half.

Putting the three cases together: rare repetitions spread out over time caused no harm anywhere (#43, #44). Dense repetitions are more interesting. The only page in the entire series that was zeroed out—an internal category from case #44—combined the worst combination across three dimensions: repetitions were dense (intervals of 1.8–3.2 months), the page itself was internal, and—perhaps most importantly—the share of the repeating wording in the page's anchor profile was overwhelming: 4 out of 8 links were verbatim repetitions, and the other four were close variations of the same phrase. Here, on the homepage, dense repetitions dissolved into a large, diverse profile: the most frequent anchor accounted for only 7 links out of 76 (9%), with 42 different wordings in total. Four identical anchors among seventy different ones look natural; four among eight look like a template. Which version is decisive—the page type or the share of repetition in the profile—cannot be separated across three cases; we know one thing for sure: repetitions spread out over time are safe, and anchor diversity is the best insurance regardless of the batch size.

Conclusions from the case

• In an ultra-high-frequency niche, links work almost instantaneously. ×7 in the very first month of placements versus a lag of 4–8 months in «ordinary» commercial niches (#43, #44). If all demand resides in a couple of queries and the site is fresh—the effect is visible within weeks.
• The other side of the same coin is fragility. A site relying on 1–2 keys has no cushion: the March 2024 core update cut half the traffic in one move. Query diversification (as seen in the sites from cases #43/#44 with their long tail) is the insurance that was missing here.
• A permanent link lives longer than the site. The links from this case are still active—the site itself died, and for a mundane technical reason (broken HTTPS). Monitoring your own certificate costs zero rubles and saves you from losing everything: the site perished at its historical traffic peak.
• Large batches of links to the homepage worked — in this niche and on a fresh domain. But we will not generalize to «direct everything to the homepage»: in cases #43/#44, distributing links across different catalog pages yielded a more stable, diversified result.
• Case budget — 304 000 ₽ for 76 permanent links; the site lived with traffic for over two years and died for reasons unrelated to promotion.

Verifiability

The client's domain is hidden per the privacy policy, so instead of a link to the site—screenshots from analytics services (traffic estimates in interfaces and on our graphs may differ: different databases and regions; the shape of the curve matches).

Semrush Domain Overview: the 2023 surge, the 2024 erosion, the autumn 2025 drop-off — as seen on our graphs.

Ahrefs, organic traffic for all time: growth in the placement window, plateau, summer peak of 2025, and a drop to zero. White badges Ⓖ — Google algorithm updates, green marks — site content edits (recorded by Ahrefs).

Ahrefs, keywords by position: growth of baskets in the campaign window and a break along with the site.

How we measured

Number of links, dates, anchor text and repetitions — from the Tier1.shop order database (only completed placements; 76 permanent, one client). Traffic and positions — Semrush (specifically rebuilt based on the Kazakhstan database — site geo) and Ahrefs (world, daily points); graphs are built from raw exports. The one-time December peak of 1 202 is not included in the headline figures (see footnote on the graph). The diagnosis of the site's death — direct checks: DNS resolves, HTTP responds, HTTPS connection is not established; the traffic collapse is synchronous across two independent services.

*Costs are calculated at current Tier1.shop prices; the client was placed at the prices of their time — the order of magnitude is the same.