Technical SEO Checklist for Casino Websites

How to use this checklist

Run it per template, not per page, and record evidence for each item: the URL tested, the date, the tool and what you saw. The interactive version on our audit checklist page lets you tick items and export a text record. Nothing on that page scans your site.

1. Crawl access

• robots.txt on every host (main, sportsbook, CDN, static) returns 200 and allows the templates you want indexed. Google says its crawlers "treat all 4xx errors, except 429, as if a valid robots.txt file didn't exist", and a 5xx response stops crawling for the first 12 hours. Test paths with our robots.txt rule explorer.
• Verified Googlebot gets 200 responses, not 403, 429 or challenges, from the CDN and bot-management layer. Check logs. See server log analysis.
• Geo rules, age gates and cookie banners do not replace page content for crawlers, and crawlers see the same content as users in the same location.
• Redirect chains are one hop where possible; internal links point at final URLs.
• Removed games, ended promotions and finished events return 404 or 410, or redirect to a close replacement, not a 200 "not available" page.
• HTML responses stay well under Googlebot's 2MB uncompressed fetch limit.

2. Rendering

• Main content, H1, internal links, canonical and meta robots are in the server HTML for every indexable template.
• Internal links are <a href> elements; routing uses the History API, not fragments.
• No content requires a click, scroll, permission or stored setting to appear.
• Client-side "not found" views return a real 404 or add noindex.
• noindex is never removed by JavaScript; Google may skip rendering pages that start with noindex.
• Raw versus rendered comparison recorded per template. See the rendering test.

3. Indexing signals

• One canonical URL pattern per template; internal links, sitemaps and rel=canonical all agree.
• Tracking, affiliate, sort and session parameters are not in internal links.
• No robots.txt or noindex used for canonicalization.
• Sitemaps list only canonical, indexable, 200 URLs, split by template, with lastmod taken from real content changes. See sitemap strategy.
• Search Console Domain property verified by DNS, plus URL-prefix properties per product host if needed.
• Page indexing report reviewed monthly by template; "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" investigated. See canonical problems.

4. Structure and internal linking

• Every sitemap URL is reachable from the homepage through crawlable links.
• Lobbies use paginated URLs linked with anchors, not only infinite scroll.
• Provider, feature and category hubs link to their games; game pages link back and to related games.
• Breadcrumbs on all deep templates.
• Faceted filter URLs you do not want indexed are blocked from crawling; ones you do want have fixed filter order and real content.
• Orphan check run after navigation changes. See orphan pages.

5. International and multi-market

• hreflang pairs are reciprocal, each page lists itself, codes are ISO 639-1 language with optional ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 region.
• x-default set for country selectors and auto-redirecting homepages.
• No forced geo-redirects that stop users or crawlers reaching other versions.
• Each market version canonicalizes to itself, not to another language. See hreflang errors.

6. Performance

Google's Search documentation says good Core Web Vitals align "with what our core ranking systems seek to reward". web.dev defines the targets, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads:

INP replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024. Measure with field data from real users, not only lab tests.

7. Policy and trust

Technical work cannot fix a site that breaks Google's spam policies, and the policy page uses casino examples. Under the site reputation policy, Google's example is "a medical site hosting a low-quality, third-party advertising page about "best casinos" that isn't integrated with the site". Under expired domain abuse, the example is "casino-related content on a former elementary school site". Among its examples that are not inconsistent with the site reputation policy, the page lists "using affiliate links throughout a page"; the separate thin affiliation policy still applies.

• No casino content placed on unrelated host sites to borrow their ranking signals.
• No expired domains repurposed for gambling content.
• No near-identical city or region landing pages created only to rank (doorway abuse) and no mass-produced pages (scaled content abuse).
• Paid and affiliate links carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".
• Responsible gambling information, license details and terms are easy to find.

Google's ranking systems guide also notes that the helpful content system became part of its core ranking systems in March 2024, and that "site-wide signals and classifiers are also used". Google Ads gambling certification is a separate process covering ads, not organic results.

Questions technical teams ask

Does passing this checklist mean our casino pages will rank?

No. It makes pages eligible to be crawled and indexed. Google decides independently whether to crawl, index and rank each URL, based on many signals including content quality and relevance.

What are the current Core Web Vitals thresholds?

web.dev defines good as LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. INP replaced FID on March 12, 2024.

Do Google's spam policies mention casino sites specifically?

Yes. The site reputation example is a low-quality "best casinos" page hosted on an unrelated medical site, and the expired domain abuse example is casino content on a former elementary school site.