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
