Why Crawl Stats and Server Logs Are the Hidden Gems of SEO with Maja Jovančević

I think the affiliates that are thinking more long term and they are thinking with the player in mind and like how much value can I actually bring to the player are probably going to stand at winners of of this full ordeal game whatever is happening right now with the surfs etc but I might be wrong it's a crazy it's crazy time maybe I'm too optimistic but I I do believe that brand building I do believe that you know reputation building and everything else that you can

do with the player is actually helpful to you as well as an affiliate your longevity. I'm John Wright and you're listening to AffiliateBI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Stata. Welcome to the AffiliateBI podcast. Today we're chatting with Maya Yuvanche. She's the director of SEO at Gen 2 Media and she's been the director of SEO and many SEO roles for the past six years at Gaming Innovation Group.

She's well known in the SEO space, especially in I gaming as a speaker and she's also a recent author contributor of I gaming SEO book, which is amazing. Maya, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you, John. Just a small correction. I uh I resigned my position at Gen 2. What? Okay. about a month and a half ago. Okay. So, are you allowed to say what you're working on now or is that top secret?

It's it's still in progress, but the plan is to actually have a little bit of rest, a little bit some things that I wanted to do for for the longest of times and then dive into something else. All right, we will chat after. So, let's jump right into the questions. I've gone through the book here and you've given a lot of really good helpful tips and I just want to dive a bit deeper.

One thing you talked about is about crawl stats and server logs are important and you actually include that in some of your interview questions when you like hiring people. So I want to ask what can affiliates do to one understand how valuable this is what they need to look for and do you think there's a way that maybe we could help affiliates set this up or are there already tools that's you know what John just go use one of these like hrefs or semrush or mangles

or something like what is it? Okay, so the crawl stats basically you can get them either from Google search console or from your actual server log files and then you can use whatever tool you prefer. Like some SEOs they prefer to do it themselves and some SEOs use Screaming Frog log file analyzer and they just figure out like what's happening and how Google is accessing your website.

And I think this is very important and especially today because I think in the last couple of months maybe six months to a year and then potentially within the future I think Google is going to see a lot of problems with resources. We are now having a huge amount of expansion with AI being able to generate really good content and there are content all over the place being generated and Google needs resources to crawl that content to index it and to keep it in their index.

What's happening is that I believe that like while they do this, they're probably going to figure out the way to make it easier for them and cheaper for them to to generate to crawl those resources. resources. And it's not going to be easy for newer websites to get crawled as often as possible. And the authority of the website is probably going to be the determining factor whether you get crawled or not.

We still don't know this, but this is something that you can probably see. So, if you see your your crawl analysis and then you see like the various bots that are trying to access your website and then you check it by by let's say Google bot and then you see like how often has Google bot to access some of your pages and what is the server response for those pages.

So for example, if it's a well setup page that hasn't been updated for long, it might be a 304 or for which means just use just use what you have in cache or or it just might be a 200 or whatever or you might have a lot of 404 pages that you don't know that Google is still trying to access etc. So like it is your duty to manage Google to manage your website so that you can make Google's job easier and I think that is

very important for all the SEOs going forward just because those resources that Google is having are going to become less and less because there's the boom of content that's coming out of the internet and I sincerely hope I'm wrong but launching new website at this point might be really risky unless there is unless you probably are launching them with an existing backlink profile on a domain with an existing backlink profile or something like that.

Now, this is these are the things that are interesting to me. These are the things that I would like to test. I can see whether I'm right because at this point like it's all a hypothesis how this could be. But I really like SEOs who look at everything like from server log files to the content to the links, back links, everything technical. I like full stack SEOs.

I like SEOs who like really want to improve the website the best way they can. Okay. And are you one of those SEOs that likes to take the same data sets and put them into customized Looker Studio dashboards and say you just need to look at things in a different way rather than what's presented to you from your Google search console and your Google Analytics. Google Analytics.

I I'm actually I have my own processes for that. But I am one of those SEOs who looks at data like from all the different angles because and I remember one of my co-workers saying this. There are two ways to look at this. So if you have data with data without proper interpretation is nothing. But if you have an opinion and you don't have the data to back it up, it's just an opinion.

So it needs to be merged together. So I really like looking at data and I want to see what the data tells me. I don't have a theory and then distort to the data so that it could correspond to the theory. I really look at the data and want to see what the data tells me. Okay. And what about what do affiliates do when you've wrote multiple times that Google's aggregating your data and they're not really sending you back to your own website.

It's like they're just consuming your data, giving you the summary and go that's the answer you're looking for. You got the answer. What do you want next? What can affiliates do to say they're very greedy in the sense like they want the click like the end destination is get the click but what would you say affiliates need to do to drive value such that they don't stop and end at Google that they continue and they find your site they find your brand okay I think like

Google has been trying to close the gap of the click like for some time now like they have been like zero click searches for example when they what that what they just changed with their rich results for example for a lottery winnings like that used to be like huge traffic driver and like even those pages even though the conversion would be low it would still be like when you when you put in the traffic it's still a significant percentage but then like in Google SERs they

just publish the results which they scrape from another website and then you lose that type of traffic so Google has been doing that for quite a few years now and now with the AI overviews I think It really depends on what the search is and what the query is etc. The data so far has shown that not a lot of clicks come from the actual EI reviews.

So if you are mentioned in the EI reviews if there's a link to your website you won't actually get as many clicks but the second result will get as many clicks. And we were laughing about it. It's the first time where SEOs don't want to be first on Google which because the AI over would be but it's all about the query and the intent of the query and some of the queries they just might be too longtail for Google to target at this point.

We are very much observing the space and we're also trying to adjust to what's happening. Okay. You talk about a lot of the the black hat techniques that people have used and they can use including parasite SEO. Do you think we're in the era now where it's like people are feeling incentivized to go to Reddit and just say I'll give you an example. What if we wanted Google a overviews to talk positive about staff?

We could go on Reddit and say staff is the best at aggregating data one. Does that work? And what would your strategy be to be like the white hat version of that so it actually has maximum impact? Oh, I don't think Reddit would be the only thing that's enough. like I would expand it. And obviously you need to be where the users are. So if your users are on Reddit and and as much as I know Reddit, I think if you just start with a boosting

post, they're just going to call you out on that. So it's not going to work really well and you're going to have those responses also included. So, it's really it's an interesting approach to get the buzz out there, but it's all entangled in the EAT that you are building in terms of mentions for your brand. And at this point, we're entering the PR territory. So if you want to get the good PR for your tool, like you can employ all the PR tactics that a bunch

of people in PR have already employed and we all know what they are. It's just like you need to put them on the web. So just figure out where it could be, what the mentions are, etc. Like I see a lot of SEOs just like testing this. You don't need technically Reddit. You can also do it on LinkedIn. It's very much crawable and and you can also build a reputation there as well.

So, it's all about trial and testing and as every SEO I would tell you just test it out. Always be testing. Yes. Yeah, that would be it. Now, do you think that it's important for affiliates to diversify traffic where I think in the last 10 to 15 years like the SEO affiliate playbook has been basic. It's create your content, build links, rank it in Google, print money, buy more affiliate sites, and get bigger and buy even more affiliates.

So, what do you think affiliates need to do today? Is it YouTube? Is it Reddit? Is it LinkedIn? Is it streaming? Is it all of it? Or is it depends? Oh, thank you for asking me this question. this question. I think affiliation as a model existed like throughout the centuries and affiliation in gambling has multiple platforms. It's not just about SEO. There are obviously like opportunities to paid for play on many other social networks such as Tik Tok etc.

So like there are options to do everything. It's just like where are your customers? where is the best value that you can get for your for where you put your effort in. And I think a lot of people have tested this out and SEO turned out to be the best one. And I'm actually not surprised because like I think my theory is that Google understands where you are in your search journey because they do monitor and process those results.

They now have a quantum chip to do that. So like they do monitor and they process those results and they give you the best websites based on what they think based on what their algorithm thinks would be the best result for you. So at this point they're giving you the affiliate that's the most ready to convert. And that's why you don't get the same kind of results with paid the best players the best conversions and everything else.

I think at this point somebody needs to share their stats and say how much Reddit has worked for them or other platforms and then we'll know and if you see a lot of affiliates moving to Reddit and testing these things out then then you'll know but unless you unless it's all about Google and fighting for that first position etc then Google would be still the best the best source.

Yeah, we always know there will be affiliates that once they find a channel that they're the only ones using it. They will not share that with anyone else. The big, no, I'm taking this. I've had friends tell me like there's one affiliate program that they rank for a brand and it makes them so much money. They're like, I don't want anyone taking them out of the number one spot.

And I actually had that happened to me once with two casinos I just ranked number one for. I'm like wasn't trying, but I'm like I don't want anyone coming in here. Yeah, you give me this ranking because it's the only strong rankings I had. Yes, there are certain combinations that are true money winners and I don't think anybody will be ready to share that. So, pivoting to back to this book, one of the common questions talked about nav boost, how important it is.

So, I want to ask you what is it? Why is it important? I think it's important because I come more from like the product design angle and I know you probably have a lot more data and experience in how user experience and design plays an important role in SEO. Okay. So I I hope I get to explain this properly but nab boost is just part of Google's algorithm and I think like there has been like a conversations among SEOs like whether what does it do and

how does it works etc. But like in the most simplest of terms and I do hope and I do underline most simplest of terms that means that the more visits you get the better rankings you're going to get. Aka traffic is a ranking signal. So like that would be it. I hope I explained this properly. If there are any SEOs who disagree, please please please do correct me.

What was the other part of the question? Why is it so? Yeah, cuz it's like when I researched Nav Boost, a lot of the talk is centered around the idea of user experience where like traffic and maintaining that traffic on your site's important, but if you have a horrible user experience, it's it's part of the other feedback loop that users come from Google to your site and if they don't they're not happy with what they see, then they're gone.

So, it's like how does user experience and design have an important influence on traffic and time on site and everything else? I think we might be getting into the territory of pogo sticking at this point because if a user comes to your website and just rolls back and then obviously it's a signal for Google that they didn't find what they were looking for and whether that was because of the UX or whether that was because of they really wanted to find something and they couldn't find

it then that is that is also like a negative signal. But if you want to talk about the UX and uh and everything that has influence about SEO, there are so many case studies that show how important it is and how important it is like for for attention, for navigation, for everything else, for for general comfort that you give people when they browse your website, for everything else that you want them to see.

So I think it's a very important part of SEO and there are so many tactics as to what can you put where what gives you best and um should you have a horizontal top list should you have it scrollable what is it etc. There's a lot of tests around that area and it's not all related like to just like Google signal but yeah as I said like it's a very uh I think if you go back to Bill Slavski's blog and then you read about Nost

you're probably going to get like the best the best overview as to what it was. Yeah. was. Yeah. And what do you think about like when I look at some of the biggest I gaming affiliate companies and I look at who do they employ? It's not just SEO people, but I see a lot of product people and that job seems to becoming more and more important. How valuable or important do you think the product role is in relation to SEO?

I actually think it's very much valuable and you realize that once you have people who are very much contributing to what you do because as an SEO I I try to get stay on top of everything but it's impossible to stay on top of like almost everything. For example, coding languages etc. Like I'm good at technical but give me an app to code like it will be like I'll try and Yeah.

Same here. Exactly. So, and nobody expects me to because I am supposed to be the troubleshooter. I'm supposed to understand what I see on the website. And I think when you think about the product and the value that they bring, it's not just building a sustainable website, it's also understanding like how it's understanding code complexity like what can be built upon like the function the functions that it has and also like understanding what are the features that the users is going user is going to want

and also figuring out what you can have that is above what the competition is having as So you don't want to just be stuck copying your competition in terms of user experience, development, features, widgets, everything else that you have. You want to be the front runner on that end. And for that like a valuable user experience person who understands the business, who understands like the main goal which is to get the customer and get the customer to convert.

So get in and get out. And that is basically our main our main business model. And I think the actual product person that understands this and is able to research, get into the mindset, figure out everything, test and come up with ideas is very invaluable to the business. Yeah. Because I think a good product person would actually say, "Wait a minute, we also need first party data." So, it's if you've done all that valuable SEO work, I think the old playbook is you get Google traffic,

they click on a link, you make your money, you never talk to that player again, and you probably do, but you don't even know who they are. And maybe if you have an actual product, it's like they're stuck to you. to you. Yeah, I don't know how that ends, but there's a lot of things that we're trying still to figure out. And if somebody else has a tool that has it figured out, I would love to, but like from the keyword to the FTD, I think

there's a lot of things there that I don't know like from the click like to to the FTD. I think like that can be tricked, but like from the keyword that's actually because Google doesn't let you give that data. So all we have at this point is a very good causality that we can work with and like thinking because if you drop one position and then your FTGS drop or whatever happens then you know that this was a valuable keyword and obviously as you go further

in your career you'll notice much you'll notice those shifts and then you know that it's best if you're ranked number one for everything and then you don't have any problems. But that's impossible. Yeah. Close. In the book, you also talked about one of the questions was what are some of the ways in which you can use AI for affiliate sites? And I think you wrote about that there was a chatbot made that was basically super useful.

So I got a two parts of the question. Do you think users are going to start changing how they interact with websites and data where they're going to become more comfortable with the chatbot rather than the old school tables and filters? Okay. So I think that is something that Gen 2 media has launched and that is something that I think I don't I have not seen anybody else do it.

We have basically integrated AI within one of the websites. Yes, I was actually very proud of the team that did it and it was like it was an amazing thing that they did and honestly let's see let's see how it works. AI is still developing learning etc. And like the models are there. It's also not cheap to use them even with the API wrapper or whatever. I'm not giving any ideas but AI is not cheap.

So it really depends. But I do think and this is coming from my first SEO boss who is now I think from when I read his post he's probably one of the leading minds in terms of AI integration, Dan Petrovvic. and he he had a post about 10 years ago in 2014 or 2013 where he had like this whole like how he would like to see the future and he actually was like you come and you ask Google to give you a suggestion of whatever you

want to of what you want to do and I did that a couple of days ago when I told Chhat JPT can you plan my trip to Indonesia make sure I cover everything that's that's worth seeing. Give me the links for all the resorts that are good seeing. Give me three options for the hotels that it's like to stay. Find me the airlines that go there that have the best route.

And it just gave me all that. And obviously like I had to double check all of it. So I had a lot of googling my belt. But this is still I would say like semi early stages. And I think we're getting there where people are going to be very much comfortable talking to and just like asking for what they want. Yeah. Maybe the skill in the future is knowing what questions to ask and asking the right questions and being smart with it because we've seen like

a whole 15 20 years of Google, you know, how people can use Google. They're using it in the wrong way. That becomes up to us as marketers to go, okay, if you're going to search for things, but you're looking for this, your intent is over here. We're going to create the content that you're searching for. technically, but we know your intent is in the corner and we're going to basically just route you to that corner.

Yes, basically that. And honestly, let's see how it all develops. I'm very excited about the future. All right. And going back to that chatbot for Gen 2, was that an easy thing to do or you're not sure or did you get a chance to work with the team? Because I'm thinking out loud like this would be a great thing to to deploy on any site. It's more advanced than a chatbot and I'm afraid they can't.

All right, that that that's answering enough. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, I want to pivot to we're talking a lot about SEO on the affiliate side for i gaming, but let's pivot to the operator side. Do you think there's a big opportunity where operators, my opinion is they've been lazy with SEO because either they don't do SEO, they don't know how it works, or they hire the wrong SEO, but more importantly, they just say, "Okay, we're turning on the affiliate program.

Our SEO traffic's coming from affiliates. We're good." What are the opportunities there? If the mindset is all of our SEO traffic is coming from affiliates, then obviously they're losing out on a lot of things because first of all, I assume that they would always be the best results for the brand name. But I have seen websites being launched where affiliates outrank the brand name of the casino, whether that's an internal error, etc.

Speaking with other SEOs that work on the operator side, I realized how clumsy the the the setup and the structure behind it is really and how much they are having they're not having success at implementing the ideas that they want and and and everything else. And some of the casinos are probably operating with like tons and tons of as I said like complex code that's executing multiple functions and that is probably due to expire at some point and then they're just lost from the SERs because

like they become too complicated for Google to crawl again coming back to the story about the resources and everything else. So I think like for me for the operators when you have a big website big in terms of pages etc and this is what operators have those are sometimes really big websites like the only thing that can bring you down is basically technical. So you really need to optimize everything that you can from the technical perspective in order for Google to be able to crawl your

website and process your resources the easiest way possible. And if you're not doing that, you're losing out on a lot of very targeted traffic. Again, circling back to what I've just described, Google understands the user and where they're searching for. And if their casino is the best result, but Google can't crawl it, understand it, and process it properly in its data centers, then they're not going to serve them, and they're losing out on a potentially really big customer to an affiliate or to another casino.

So at this point I would say to operators look into your technical teams and see what you can do in order to improve your code your technical that is that that's the biggest pain point with big websites. Yeah. Do you think Google has already made a change where they are giving more traffic to products and e-commerce because it's been said for a while you got an affiliate website just put like a shopping cart there and you're now e-commerce and you'd rank.

But I it looks like the SERs have changed the favoritism away from content sites to more products and online casino and sports book those are products. So are you seeing this or like what do you see in the content landscape of how users can come from Google and where are they going? They hitting an operator or an affiliate or what is it? Okay, so the ad shopping cart was I think like talk of the ch my conference.

Yeah, I honestly haven't seen those websites that have been hit or like not doing great, etc. But I do believe that affiliate as a model is not done yet. We are basically review websites and there are plenty of other review websites that are still functioning. Maybe we should add some services to it, but like it's perfectly okay to also just be a review website as well. Yeah, I I do think that see this is where SEO is.

This is where SEO is tricky because this might work for somebody and it's a short-term solution and it works for them and why shouldn't they do it, right? Just because I said so. Maybe I would have a long-term solution that would be like maybe beneficial for the future or something like that. But it really depends. So this is why SEOs check in. There's a lot of things that other SEOs would do differently and that maybe I would do differently.

But I have spoken with a lot of people who who have been hit by Google updates and who wanted to do all the magic recovery stuff. Publish it on a different domain, do a 302 redirect or or add a shopping cart to your website before you get hit or or or redirect it to something else or like just trying out some other things. For me, I would always try to figure out like what happened first.

And my approach is not the fastest one, I have to admit, because I tend to really look at what's been happening and what the data is. So, it might take a little bit of time to understand where the problem lies. But if I'm able to diagnose it properly and so far I have been, you never know with Google, I think I'm able to recover a website without actually needing a lot of these very risky tactics.

But again, if it works for somebody and they have this like short-term website, they don't care what the domain is, they don't care about the eat, etc., they just care about the rankings, then by all means just do it. I am with the other SEOs in the whatever works. Yeah. Okay. I think what you said was interesting in the sense that you said affiliates could be doing more than just content, like they could be doing services.

So, one thing I think that actually might change in the near future is like we have a product that's called dynamic variables. So, it gives you the ability to have click IDs, which is great because then you can actually show which pages you know the player came from. But if you have this with first party data means you've got the player's email. So, if you actually send them a hard-coded click ID, you actually have the deposit and revenue activity.

You basically own the player. So, now that you own the player, you can see when they stop playing at the casino, you can actually have your own Pam. Like PAMs are normally for operators, but if you're an affiliate, this is a service. You're now not just referring players to the casino. You're actually helping them with things like the obvious one is there's complaints. There's like trying to get more bonuses or hey, I'm a good player.

Can I actually get upgraded to another casino? And it's if you have this data ready to go, it's the service part. Maybe this will be one of the changes in on the eye gaming affiliate side. side. Let's see. I think the affiliates that are thinking more long term and they are thinking with the player in mind and like how much value can I actually bring to the player are probably going to stand at winners of of this full ordeal game whatever is happening right now with

the surfs etc but I might be wrong it's a crazy it's crazy time maybe I'm too optimistic but I I do believe that that brand building. I do believe that you know reputation building and everything else that you can do with the player is actually helpful to you as well as an affiliate your longevity. Yeah. So what would you do if you're building a brand new website and let's say you're building one not like 40 or hundreds and you know what's part of the brand strategy

that is that would be your signature? Okay, it's a it's a trick question because it really depends on the market. certain markets if you want fast results you don't go with a brand new website but you've asked me a hypothetical question let me just add like it's a hypothetical question so let's say that like the situation is that once I build this website properly it's going to rank and do it wonderfully etc etc etc so I would pick a domain that has a keyword in it

but also has something else that could be also construed as part of the brand that could be a little bit different. Now, with the newest Google rules, I would either switch to both to either betting or casino. Although, I have seen betting websites doing really well in the casino space and vice versa. This is just me. So, I'm not here giving other people telling them what to do.

Like, I've seen everything. It just this is just me. I would pick one niche. I would use the teachings of semantic SEO to figure out like what kind of content I need here, what my interlinking needs to be, how everything should be there, and I would try to get the best deals that I can for for my for my users. And obviously since it's me, I would probably go to a medium difficulty market which means that players are have a higher value and there's not a

lot of affiliates there. So like medium difficulty like not in a very saturated market etc like some somewhere medium difficulty where your efforts could actually be there and and that would be generally it. I would just opt for a simple clean WordPress platform with everything that works, test everything properly and and that would be me. Obviously caveat, there are shortcuts for everything. There are ways that you can make this better, etc.

Obviously, there's a lot of EAT that you can do so far. There are a lot of features that you can develop on your website, etc. But for me when I launch something I always go from an MVP like minimum viable product and once you launch it then you can develop it and then you can move it a little bit further. So that is my approach. I'm sure that other SEOs have other approaches and other ways to do it and obviously it my approach will not work

on every market. It it depends on the competition. It depends on everything. Now, we're talking about a hypothetical situation where there's a fresh domain. Obviously, somewhere you're going to want an expired one. You you would want something else. There are some shortcuts that you want to take or you don't want to take. I think a good SEO knows everything and is able to find the best thing that kind of brings company money.

And that is that's my take on it. But hypothetically, I hope I answered your question. I I think so. There's a lot of rabbit holes that can we can go down. Going to ask a side question where it's like I know you're always looking at different I gaming affiliate websites and we've seen ones that are not doing well. We don't want to name them because it's like times are tough for certain affiliates.

What are you seeing as patterns of what they're doing wrong? Do you just think like they haven't understood how SEO's changed and they're still doing what got them to where they were, but they're like they can't actually just change. Is that all that really is? depends from website to website. But in terms of mindset, if you're doing what brought you rankings seven years ago, it's no longer enough.

Meaning, if you're bombarding your website with links, it's no longer enough in certain marks markets. Possibly now even in all markets. But caveat to that like I like there could be like still Malaysia and other countries that that this is working really well. But let's let's keep it like this. Also there are I'm just going to take a look at the content and obviously the content looks like very low quality and it doesn't provide any other value than the other competitors are providing.

You can see inconsistencies. You can see that it's just oh just add a paragraph so that we could get the freshness. There are also like some some errors that people apply thinking that oh I'm going to use this boost tactic and I'm going to get to the first page and then they just won't bear the of the traffic trying to replicate nav boost or whatever trending signal that they're looking at.

I don't want to name any tactics, but you can just see some tactics works work until they don't. And good SEOs, they don't have egos. And they're very much okay with being wrong. They're very much okay with being called out being wrong because Google does it all the time to us. Google is going to dank or uprank your website and you'll be like, "Okay, I need to figure out why this happened." And if you are an SEO with an ego, then technically you think that you've

done everything correctly. Meanwhile, it's not about you. It's about the new how algorithm is perceiving your website. And it could be something completely different. And if you don't have the critical thinking to understand and look at your website critically and try and figure out like what is what could be improved on that website, then then that could be your biggest problem. Outdated tactics, too many too many tactics, too many things all the time, too many changes, not enough changes.

It really depends from the website to website. But I've never it's not that I've never seen I've seen websites with shitty content rank. But that's my opinion of Yeah. And then when I look at them from a different perspective, I like I look at like the spacing between the key terms. I look at search intent. I there are ways that I analyze who's the best in terms of search intent for certain keywords, etc.

and then you get the point and then you're like, "Okay, like this content may not be should it's laid out differently and then Google thinks it's more succinct or like better and then they prefer this to some of the other websites or vice versa. It's too long. It's too fluffy and Google doesn't understand what the writer wanted to say." Yeah. So, it really Yeah. I hope I answered your question.

Yeah. It's a great way to to look at it because the way I see it is what you described is ego is a problem because when you have an ego, you're not willing to be wrong. You're not willing to talk to other people. Like you you with an ego, you would actually literally not contact any of these people and go, "Hey, can I hire you for an hour or a couple hours and get your help?

Maybe you can see something." It's like they're in their own silo and and they're not at Mai where you'll be hanging out or some of these other SEO conferences. It's that that's the difference of what I see of some of the people that are actually doing really right now and they're almost laughing. They're like, "This is actually even better than before." I'm like, "Wow, it's that good." I whatever you said, I I think it's very important for the SEOs to just understand that we're trying to

convince, let's face it, we're trying to game Google's algorithm to convince it that we're the best result out there. Sometimes you can be the best result out there by being the best result out there. Sometimes you can do it by trying to remove the best results out there. Sometime with negative SEO attacks, sometimes you can just try and do the best that you can. But if you're not willing to learn, if you're not willing to pivot, that's that's that's not that's not in the spirit of

SEO. like SEOs. SEOs that truly like SEO, they like it because they like the detective work, like the figuring out part, the what went right, the what went wrong, the what's the next thing. And I think if you have that like curiosity in you, like there's no problem because I don't think you need a specific Yeah, I don't think you need to understand the algorithm in order to be a good SEO.

And I'm going to quote one of the SEOs that that told me something and I truly loved it. He says, "Do you know how I train my people?" I'm like, "H" and he's I give them a website and I tell them, "You have a month to get this website penalized." And first thing that they do is do they go to Fiverr and buy links? And he Yes.

The first thing they do is they go to Fiverr, they buy links, and what happens? the website starts ranking and the website starts ranking. That's amazing because like you need to test these things out. There's a lot of noise in the SEO world. There's a lot of noise in the SEO world and we're creating one but you need to test your things and like you doing a website trying to rank a page or just I think Mark Mark Cook took some of his old content, published

it on LinkedIn and just started ranking right away. and he called it like the 72-hour SEO hack just like test things and that's what SEO is all about. We tried to test things and figure things out. Yeah. What I like about SEO is I refer to it as the original online marketing business intelligence. We're trying to talk about business intelligence and affiliate marketing and it's what is search console analytics seamrush hrefs and streaming frog.

They're the OG tools of business intelligence. This is what I think it comes down to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree with that. That's a very good categorization. Yeah. So, last question. Speaking of business intelligence, what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence? This is one of those questions that I wished that I could I would received earlier so I could prepare an answer.

And it would have helped if I sent it on time, not less than an hour before. Nah, it's fine. I didn't even see them. Okay. affiliate market, marketing and business intelligence. What do I see it as a future, right? Yeah. As they intersect with each other. I honestly what would I love to see is like the full circle. The full circle like Google being able to share with us like a lot of data like where they sent like which keyword, what time etc.

like very and full data also like they're also excluding a lot of data like from Google search console you have to get it into look and then whatever but yeah they're excluding a lot of data and I would love to see the full set of data and then I would love to see the full circle like from the keyword to the FTD or whatever the downloading the PDF or whatever the affiliates goal is I'm not just talking here about gambling but whatever the goal is And

I would I would love to say that data and for me in terms of understanding Google who I think they're providing us a lot of data already which is really nice. You can see almost a lot of things in Google search console and a lot of SEOs love it. Some don't trust it, but like a lot of SEOs love it and we see it. And I think what else would I love to see?

They're not including AI overviews just yet. Just yet. So that would be really nice to see like how much actually are you getting? And I think like the reason is because you're not getting that could be it. But like we've had the discovery part. we had all the other Google search console options of like traffic sources. So AI over could be one of those that would be really nice to see and and I just love data and I would just love to have like more of

it. Yeah, just give us more data. I agree. We're working on a few data projects where we hope we can actually be a source of data that's not been seen before. We don't look at our customers data, but maybe there's a future where they would be able to share it and anonymize it so people could actually see which casinos and sports books convert the best in each market.

And how does that change in time? Because none of this is linear. It's it's always changing as you add a project, as you subtract the a product, as you add a payment method, as you lose one, as something happens or a change of ownership. There's too many things that are major factors in all these products and nothing's nothing's static. It's day by day. Anything could change. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. I could not agree more. Yeah. Maya, thank you so much for doing this. I want to pass it back to you to ask how can people get a hold of you? And one last reminder that they can also read your chapter in this I gaming SEO book as well. It's actually a really loving book. I lovely book. I I'm happy to have contributed to it. We were joking around that like I'm the only woman at the cover and then we were joking around who should

get the wig in the the the next but I think professionally it's best on LinkedIn because like I share the photos of my travels on my personal Facebook car LinkedIn is more than enough. LinkedIn it will be and then we'll chat behind the scenes about what you're working on next and looking forward to it. LinkedIn Thank you for tuning in to the AffiliateBI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your

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