Delving deeper into this month's Affiliate Traffic Update by DeepCI, iGBA reached out to Julia Logan, SEO consultant at Irishwonder.com, to investigate what caused the Catena brand's ranking rise.
The latest findings from iGBA’s data partner DeepCI reveal a spike in the Argentinian sports rankings from December 2023 to January 2024 for Catena-owned Bettingpro.com.
Bettingpro.com saw its ranking rise from 25th to 4th across the two months, marking it as the largest change across all of the markets observed by the EveryMatrix-owned data company. The site recorded an estimated monthly click volume of 17,895 for the period behind Sportytrader.com’s 32,056 total.
Taking a deeper look into Catena Media’s activities reveals the significance behind its 2017 acquisition of BayBets for an estimated €57m (£48.8m/$62.1m).
Completed in 2019, the deal gave the affiliate assets that it ultimately no longer needed following its strategic review that was initiated in May 2022. In the review, Catena decided to exit European markets and divest assets to focus on the North American market.
Zangoose Digital CEO and SEO expert Julia Logan believes this is relevant to Bettingpro.com’s sudden boost in organic rankings in Argentina due to the redirects now being seen on the site.
“If we look at Bettingpro.com’s link profile, it largely consists of redirects, in fact 85% of the entire link profile according to Majestic’s data,” she said.
The site publishes content in English, Spanish and Portuguese and allows users to switch through a menu option. By selecting a different language a user can view localised content and in particular Argentinian content is displayed by selecting the Spanish language option.
Yet, Logan reveals that over 23% of link sources are German with Majestic aware of 54 redirected domains now pointing at Bettingpro.com.
“A large part of these redirects are German betting affiliates sites which we can assume were part of the Baybets acquisition,” she added. “It appears that Catena Media started redirecting some of these domains as early as 2020 not long after the acquisition."
The SEO expert also highlights that this surge is not the first ranking boost in Bettingpro.com’s history. “According to additional data from Sistrix and SERanking, the site has already had significant organic visibility growth which started in March 2023.
“That was then followed by a decline and possibly even got affected by the October Google spam update, but it remains to be seen if this rise will be as short-lived.”
You can see Bettingpro.com’s spike as well as affiliate search traffic data across the industry’s 50 biggest geos in the latest DeepCI update here.