I’ve been watching new players in the parasite SEO space for a while now, to the point where a new player pops up, I kind of know the drill. With that said, a new gambling site suddenly appeared on my radar — one that didn’t have anything to do with online casinos until literally weeks ago. I started looking around, peering under the hood as best I could. I found yet another Finixio/Clickout Media asset, being run the way they do all their parasite operations.
At this point, I’m starting to wonder if they’ve found a way to automate the process of hollowing out once-reputable sites and turning them into vehicles for parasite SEO promoting crypto gambling. (There is a big post coming on that side of things.) Meantime, let’s find out why cardplayer.com is suddenly an authority on unlicenced crypto gambling in Sweden, shall we?
New URL, same old MO
The standard approach for parasite SEO is to find a site that has excellent domain authority and then publish your own, unrelated material on it. Finixio/Clickout’s innovation has been to hunt sites they can buy outright and then do the same thing sitewide, turning the whole site into a vehicle for their gambling and crypto business.
I’ve never seen it done more clearly than at cardplayer.com.
Some history: cardplayer.com is the online arm of Card Player magazine, which has been an authority in poker since the year dot. I read it myself when I was younger, and it was a reliable source of knowledge and insights about poker long before the poker boom or the explosion of interest in online poker. cardplayer.com moved that action online, but this wasn’t just a fairly reputable poker and online gaming site. It was the Rolling Stone of poker. Even now, it has dozens of pages dedicated to analyzing poker tactics and strategy.
https://www.cardplayer.com/poker-strategy
If you’ve never played, poker is a complex game with a mixture of managing the cards, the betting system and how you interact with other players. So there’s a lot to figure out. cardplayer.com used to address that complexity, with an eye to the experienced player and some help for newbies.
cardplayer.com has a media kit, not updated since 2010, that reinforces the impression:
https://www.cardplayer.com/media-kit
There’s about four news stories a day about poker too, following the professional game from table to table. It goes back years and is still updated daily. There’s a player database, tournament coverage and more. This feels like the kind of content you’d get on a site that was for, and by, people who really cared about the game of poker.
The same keywords as always
This, on the other hand…
…this is identical to the keywords that other Finixio-owned sites ranked for. Before Techopedia violated Google’s guidelines a second, blatant time and was penalized severely, it ranked for identical keywords.
This isn’t as weird as Techopedia or ReadWrite ranking for these terms. After all, cardplayer.com is a gambling site, it says so on the tin. But its focus has historically been on poker. It doesn’t even seem to have a blackjack section or a page devoted to whist.
In other words, this is classic parasite SEO — again. cardplayer.com has a good reputation in the industry and the website is so old its terms of use were last updated in 2010. It has domain authority to burn:
https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker/?input=cardplayer.com
But still, why would a poker site rank for crypto casino terms? That doesn’t make much sense. Unless…
The same changes as always
There have been some major changes to the cardplayer.com experience recently.
In the past, it looked slightly different.
Here’s the front page in October 2024
https://web.archive.org/web/20240928192447/https://www.cardplayer.com/
For contrast, here’s the same front page in January 2025
There is something that stands out as instantly different: ‘Women in Poker’ have mysteriously vanished, to be replaced by ‘Online Casinos.’ The sidebar on the left of the page doesn’t offer to find you a local room or teach you the game anymore. Instead, it offers to hook you up with high-bonus online poker sites.
What’s happened here?
Bought and/or paid for
Finixio/Clickout Media have either bought this site, or paid the owners to run a parasite operation through it.
I tend to believe that they bought the site. The reason for that is that in December 2024, papers were filed with the business registry in Nevada, where Card Player and cardplayer.com’s parent company was fittingly headquartered, dissolving the LLC.
https://esos.nv.gov/EntitySearch/BusinessFilingHistoryOnline
Card Player Media, LLC goes back to 1993, and has had the same agent for the last five years: Barry Schulman.
https://esos.nv.gov/EntitySearch/BusinessFilingHistoryOnline
So this is a really major change, indicating that the whole business has been shaken up. I’d be willing to bet (on certain platforms) that a new owner shows up soon, registered to the Marshall Islands or somewhere with similarly opaque business registration rules. But for now this is all we know.
Nevertheless, the pattern is still clear.
You can see the standard insertion of online gambling content into a site that didn’t previously feature it; the continued publishing schedule of somewhat similar content, to keep the site’s credibility high; the sudden, impressive ranking for identical keywords is the clincher.
Here’s their list of ‘Best Bitcoin Casinos’:
https://www.cardplayer.com/online-casinos/best-bitcoin-casinos
(Note that Instant Casino is itself a Finixio asset…)
Their top pick, CoinCasino, does offer online poker:
But that’s just 13 results across the whole site.
It’s much more about baccarat, blackjack and even roulette.
https://www.coincasino.com/en/live-casino
There are pages of these.
No license, no oversight, no comeback
Why is cardplayer.com so eager to direct traffic to an online casino site that doesn’t really specialise in poker, and whose main distinguishing feature is that it’s focused on crypto?
Maybe we can get a hint of an answer by looking at the other categories that made it onto their online gambling dropdown?
So you have crypto, fast payouts, offshore, no KYC (Know Your Customer, a financial regulation meant to stop fraud, scams and money-laundering), and Inclave casinos. (Inclave is a password management tool.) This is the shady end of the online gambling pool.
That makes good sense. When we look at cardplayer.com’s ranking keywords in other countries, like the UK:
Or the USA:
We can see the same pattern playing out. These are all overseas, unlicensed or using crypto.
It’s the same story in Australia:
And in the Netherlands:
These are the same search terms that every other site taken over by Finixio/Clickout ranks (or ranked) for. And just like the other parasite portals operated by Finixio/Clickout, they popped up from nowhere, and suddenly ranked for terms that are highly competitive and should have taken years to rank for. This site went from not touching on these topics at all, to ranking top three for them, in three months or less. These kinds of results are simply not possible with conventional SEO.
Who’s the dealer?
How do we know this is Finixio up to their usual tricks?
Well, we can connect senior writing staff. That’s always a good place to start. (Read on for discussion of some of the other writing staff…) As is so often the case with Finixio assets, proving ownership isn’t easy. The usual MO is to have no official relationships between businesses that are all owned by, or employ, the same handful of people. But they do the same thing with their writing staff. We normally find the same people flitting between one Clickout asset and another, or from Clickout as a journalist to their latest venture as managing editor or executive editor.
For example, here’s cardplayer.com’s new sports betting editor:
https://www.cardplayer.com/uk/author/ciaranmceneaney/page/2
Ciaran is a real person with a lengthy professional past in the gambling space:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ciaran-mceneaney/
And he’s not the only one. Ricky Davies is human too:
https://www.cardplayer.com/ca/author/rickydavies
His LinkedIn looks like what he says he is, a copywriter with a poker focus.
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/rickydavies
Where it’s easier, or there’s likely to be scrutiny, Finixio(Clickout fills the ranks with actual humans. What about where it’s mostly low-quality content, and they don’t think anyone will notice? Different story altogether.
The foreign language raid
The thing is, these are mostly English-language authors and editors. And that makes sense because it’s a primarily English-language site. In fact, until the takeover, it was solely in English.
Now, though, the site does rank for non-English search terms that are location- or language-specific:
Nobody outside Germany is searching for ‘online casino mindesteinzahlung 5 euro.’ Just like nobody outside Sweden is searching for ‘casino utan svensk licens,’ for two very obvious reasons: nobody outside Sweden speaks Swedish or cares about Swedish gambling regulations. If you live in Spain, you don’t need to look for casinos that don’t have a Swedish license. That’s what you’ll get by default.
We can take that as a given.
Still, the site ranks for these language-specific keywords.
So one way to know if these are parasite efforts would be to ask, is there a credible, sizable German-language or Swedish-language section of the site?
Look at it this way: if there’s a couple of poker news stories a day, coverage of the German poker scene, and duplicated basic site content like rules and strategy guides, all in German, that looks like they’re trying to cater to a German audience. Nothing wrong with that. Same in Swedish: there’s definitely a Swedish poker scene.There’s a Scandinavian Open with a €250,000 pot. That’s worth a few lines and a photo to any site that cares about poker, and if it’s trying to build a Swedish audience, why not write it up in Swedish?
But, if what we find is just a bunch of casino pages and nothing else in that language, then it’s safe to say that ranking for those terms is all the site’s operators care about in that language.
And…
The German portion of the site has 25 pages, including:
- The homepage in translation
- Four authors’ pages
- A guide to Texas Hold’em
All the rest are just about online gambling, exactly mirroring the gambling-related German keywords the site recently started ranking for.
The Swedish-language portion of the site has just 14 pages, all by Malin Sjöberg (see below for more about her), and apart from the translated homepage and Malin’s author page, every single one is online gambling-related. Most are about casinos. There are no Swedish-language guides or news articles at all.
This is absolutely blatant language-specific parasite SEO.
The kicker?
The site’s outlinks to topcasinosites.eu.
That’s the squeeze-page of a site that all Finixio/Clickout Media sites link to. So far I have found just one of their sites that doesn’t link or redirect there, and only their projects link there.
A ghost ship with a full crew
We can say fairly surely that this is a Finixio/Clickout Media asset. But what about the people who work on it? We’ve seen before that the Clickout MO involves firing expensive, experienced writing staff — people who care about what the business used to be, and might make a fuss if you stuff it with spammy ads and links to dodgy gambling websites. Then they replace those staff with inexperienced newcomers, or they simply don’t replace them at all. That seems to be the story at cardplayer.com.
When we started digging into this angle, we found that cardplayer.com had a whole bunch of people who didn’t seem to have LinkedIn profiles. (It’s a rare professional writer who doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile; most are shameless, compulsive self-promoters, because they don’t get work otherwise. So that’s suspicious right out of the gate.)
Who you gonna call?
The two most obvious ways to find someone from a website they have byline on is to either search their name in Google, or do a reverse image search on their profile pic. Remember, most writers are trying to get found by as many people as possible. So they use the same profile pic everywhere and put links to their personal website in their bio at every site that will let them. Normally, searching someone’s name will get you their LinkedIn right at the top, and their business website right after.
What you shouldn’t get is… nothing.
Here’s prolific Swedish-language author Malin Sjöberg:
https://www.cardplayer.com/se/author/malinsjoberg
She’s responsible for basically all the site’s ‘Oh look, I recognize that from Finixio’ content, including ‘casino without a Swedish license’:
This is a translation — in Swedish this is ‘Casino utan svensk licens,’ the #1 gambling-related keyword in Sweden. This is the page that ranks number one in Sweden for that search term, after existing just three months. That’s pretty good content writing. I bet she’s a well-known content marketer. Right?
If she’s contributed 13 of the site’s best performing pages I assume she’s a capable self-marketer. She probably has a LinkedIn page?
Seemingly not.
And a Google search doesn’t turn much up either. There’s a writer called Malin Sjöberg in Sweden, but…
https://www.bokluckan.se/tag/malin-sjoberg/
I don’t think this is our Malin Sjöberg.
Maybe a reverse image search of her profile pic will turn up something?
Apparently not. It’s very weird for a prolific and competent freelancer to have no online presence, for their profile pic to return nothing like this. That’s a professional shot, are we really going to believe that she didn’t use it anywhere else but cardplayer.com? And that she didn’t have any others that looked sufficiently similar that they’d show up in a search like this?
I guess not.
The odds are good that Malin (this Malin, not the Malin who writes novels) doesn’t exist at all. She’s the least troublesome and expensive kind of employee: a sockpuppet. I doubt she’s the only one. Even some of the authors with LinkedIn profiles are fake.
She’s not the only one.
Sometimes, the links to one author’s page go somewhere completely different. https://www.cardplayer.com/nl/author/boydbelshof leads to…
https://www.cardplayer.com/nl/author/boydbelshof
And Frederik…
…doesn’t really exist either.
And here’s how we know it’s a Clickout Media operation
Having said all of which, some of the staff at cardplayer.com can really tell a story.
Dennis looks in this mugshot like ‘voted most likely to be a native of This Person Does Not Exist.’ Don’t let it fool you, though. Despite being assigned to one of the site’s foreign-language sections as an author, he’s real.
Real enough to have a profile at known Finixio asset ReadWrite:
Unusually, he wasn’t employed as a writer at a Finixio asset and then moved up. According to his LinkedIn profile he’s still head of content at Techopedia:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-kussel-351a3a254/
He’s a trusted, important employee who’s worked at multiple core sites in the Finixio/Clickout parasite network before this one. There’s no way this isn’t their project.
You have to hand it to them
This is Finixio’s MO. It’s instantly recognizable because it’s so heavily optimized for efficiency and effectiveness. As much as I think what they do is bad, they are genuinely extremely good at doing it. They have taken a general approach, stripped it down, and fine-tuned it to become as fast and powerful as possible. They’re ranking top three for some of the toughest keywords, in just a couple of months. This is hot-rodded parasite SEO, and you know it when you see it.
But we can also see it in other ways. The relationship with staff. The link out to the same gambling website. And the really strong evidence is that high-level staff share roles across Finixio assets. We’ve seen this before, and it’s key to the way Finixio makes it difficult to identify ownership while retaining control.
In the case of cardplayer.com, it means a venerable, once-reliable source of information about poker has become a part of an international web of parasite SEO sites marketing crypto and gambling to retail investors and gamblers alike. I have a post in the works that will show that’s just the tip of the iceberg, but meanwhile, Clickout has simply moved on from Techopedia and are up to their old tricks like nothing happened — and I have to get my poker news somewhere else.