Negative SEO in igaming, why fake DMCA takedowns are a dangerous threat to the industry

Thaisa Santos, SEO manager of Oddsgate, shares insights about the igaming market, focusing on Brazil.

Opinion.-  If your betting or online casino site’s organic traffic suddenly tanked – no manual penalty, no drop in content quality, no algorithm update that explains it – the cause might not be in your own house. It might be in your competitor’s.

Brazil’s igaming market matured too fast for its own good: more than 180 operators are competing for a finite number of top spots on Google, compliance standards rose with Law No. 14,790/2023, and competition for qualified traffic has become brutal. In this environment, a specific negative SEO tactic has become increasingly common – and, according to reports from operators and affiliates in the industry, it’s now the most effective of them all: the fake DMCA takedown.

In this guide, Oddsgate rounds up the latest on negative SEO as applied to igaming, focusing on the threat that has been hurting licensed operators in Brazil the most: abuse of the copyright takedown process.

What Negative SEO Is (and Why It’s Relevant Again)

Negative SEO is any deliberate external action aimed at hurting a site’s search rankings. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on improving your own site, negative SEO tries to bring a competitor down.

The most common tactics include:

Toxic backlink attacks: buying large volumes of low-quality links pointing to the target domain, in an attempt to simulate link spam.

Scraping and content duplication: copying a competitor’s articles and publishing them across dozens of domains to generate duplicate-content signals.

Fake negative reviews: coordinated campaigns of bad reviews on Trustpilot, Reclame Aqui, and social media.

Hacking and spam injection: compromising a competitor’s site to insert malicious links or malware.

Fraudulent DMCA claims: reporting legitimate content as copyright infringement to force its removal from Google’s index.

The good news is that Google’s spam-detection system, SpamBrain, now ignores the vast majority of toxic-link attacks – industry estimates suggest around 99 per cent of obvious link manipulation simply has no effect. This has pushed bad actors towards a tactic with a much more immediate – and much harder to reverse – result: the fake DMCA claim.

Why fake DMCA claims work (and why igaming is an easy target)

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the U.S. law that created the “notice-and-takedown” system: anyone can notify a platform – Google, a hosting provider, a CDN – alleging that a piece of content infringes copyright, and the platform is legally required to remove or deindex the URL before any merit-based review takes place.

This design, intended to protect content creators, has turned into a sabotage weapon for a few reasons:

Removal is automatic and fast. Google prioritises legal compliance over verifying the claim’s accuracy – the page can disappear from the index within days, sometimes hours.

The burden of proof is reversed. The victim has to prove the claim is false only after already losing rankings, traffic, and – in the case of betting operators – potentially players and revenue.

Volume overwhelms enforcement. Documented cases show organisations submitting tens of thousands of fraudulent notices using multiple email accounts. In one case pursued by Google itself, two Vietnam-based operators were accused of submitting more than 117,000 fraudulent DMCA notices using at least 65 Gmail accounts to sabotage competitors.

The betting sector is particularly vulnerable. Content about odds, market rules, bonuses, and operator reviews tends to be structurally similar across competitors, which makes it easier for a bad-faith claimant to allege “copying” even when the content was produced independently.

Affiliates and operators across the global betting market already describe the phenomenon as a “silent epidemic”: what started as a niche threat in affiliate marketing has grown into a problem affecting regulated operators, with some sites reporting dozens – in some cases, hundreds – of improper notices, of which Google only invalidates a small fraction.

How this applies to licensed operators in Brazil

The timing couldn’t be more sensitive. Since licensing was centralised under the SPA/MF (Secretariat of Prizes and Betting, under the Ministry of Finance) and the requirement of a R$30 million licence fee for up to three brands per economic group, the Brazilian market now has around 187 authorised operators competing for the same search real estate. That creates a direct, measurable incentive for unfair practices: every ranking position a licensed competitor loses translates into traffic, sign-ups, and deposits redirected to whoever launched the attack.

For Brazilian operators, the specific risks of a fake DMCA claim include:

• Loss of visibility on conversion pages (bonus reviews, odds comparisons, sign-up pages) exactly when search volume for licensed brands is at its peak;

• Damage to perceived reliability: in a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) sector, any sign of instability on the site – pages disappearing, broken links – undermines credibility with both players and AI-powered search systems;

• A compliance ripple effect: operators that rely on educational content about responsible gambling and SPA/MF rules to reinforce E-E-A-T may find that these pages – often their most citable and “safe” – are targeted precisely because they carry the most ranking value;

• Competition based on licensing, not just content: since the number of licensed operators is public and limited, it’s trivial for a competitor to map out exactly which domains are “worth” attacking.

How to spot a negative SEO attack via DMCA

Warning signs every operator SEO team should monitor weekly:

• Sudden drops for specific pages in Google Search Console, with no recent content changes or visible manual penalty;

• “Notice of removal” emails from Google Search Console regarding copyright claims you don’t recognise;

• High-value URLs disappearing from the index (bonus pages, comparison pages, brand pages) while low-value pages stay indexed;

• A suspicious timing pattern: multiple notices arriving in sequence, often right after the launch of a major campaign or promotion;

• Generic claims, or ones lacking verifiable detail about the supposed original work being infringed.

Check the Lumen Database: many takedown notices sent to Google are publicly archived in this independent database, maintained by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. You can search by affected domain and review the sender, date, and exact content of the claim – an essential step for confirming whether a notice is legitimate or part of a pattern of abuse against your domain.

How to Respond: A defence checklist

1. Monitor proactively. Set up Google Search Console alerts for legal notices and review the “Manual Actions” and “Security Issues” reports weekly;

2. Document original authorship. Keep records of publication dates, version history, and, where possible, evidence of original creation (drafts, timestamps, version control) for all strategic content – especially reviews, comparison pages, and educational betting content;

3. File a counter-notification. If a URL is wrongly removed, Google allows you to submit a formal counter-notification under DMCA section 512(g) and equivalent legislation. It must include the affected URL, the legal justification for reinstatement, and a detailed statement of facts. If the original claimant doesn’t file a lawsuit within 10 business days, Google restores the content, usually in its previous ranking positions;

4. Audit backlinks regularly. Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to identify toxic links and keep an updated disavow file, even though SpamBrain’s direct impact already neutralises most link spam;

5. Strengthen your domain’s technical authority. Technically healthy sites – HTTPS, optimised Core Web Vitals, clean structured data, correct redirects – are statistically more resistant to attacks, because Google already recognises them as trustworthy entities;

6. Consider the legal path. Fraudulent DMCA claims constitute a false statement made under penalty of perjury under U.S. law, but for Brazilian operators, the response can also draw on the national legal framework – including an extrajudicial notice to the claimant and, depending on documented financial impact, an unfair competition claim under the Industrial Property Code and the Marco Civil da Internet (Brazil’s internet law).

In practice, this is the weakest point for much of the market: many betting sites and online casinos – especially mid-sized operators and affiliates – don’t have an in-house legal team ready to respond to this kind of dispute within the deadline. Without someone monitoring notices, drafting technically sound counter-notifications, and knowing how to cross-check claims against the Lumen Database, the 10-business-day window to reverse the removal closes before the operator even realises what happened.

Thaisa Santos is Oddsgate’s SEO manager, driving SEO and content strategy across a portfolio of iGaming brands. She’s built her career primarily in the Brazilian market, with additional experience across Africa and crypto, blending technical SEO expertise with a sharp eye for content strategy to deliver sustainable organic growth in markets that are as competitive as they are tightly regulated. She thrives on turning complex SEO problems into clean, effective strategies.