Point most of your backlinks at the pages you want to rank, not at the homepage by default. A casino or sportsbook site with twenty commercial pages and a backlink profile that's 90% homepage links is asking Google to rank one URL for twenty different queries, which it won't do. A workable baseline for most gambling sites is roughly 15-25% of new links landing on the homepage and the rest spread across the money pages and supporting content actually meant to rank.
Neither extreme works alone. An all-homepage profile looks unnatural fast and starves every inner page of the authority it needs. A profile that never touches the homepage leaves the one page every other page inherits authority through under-fed. The right mix depends on what's already ranking and what you're trying to move next.
Why does link building default to the homepage anyway?
Most publishers link to the homepage because it's the path of least resistance — a brand mention in an article naturally links to the brand's main domain, and vendors selling guest posts find it easier to insert a generic brand anchor than to match a placement to the specific review or category page it's actually relevant to.
That default is also why homepage-heavy profiles are the first thing a manual reviewer, or a competitor running a quick backlink check, will notice: real editorial coverage links to the specific thing it's discussing, not reflexively to a root domain. Ahrefs' guide to internal links makes the same point from inside a site — authority has to be actively routed to the pages you want ranked, because it doesn't pool there by default, external or internal.
What does link depth actually do to a page's ranking ability?
A backlink doesn't just add authority to the URL it points at — it adds a vote of relevance for what that URL is about. A link pointing at your homepage tells Google your homepage is the authority on the anchor topic; a link pointing at a slots review page tells Google that specific page is the authority on slots. Stack ten homepage links with commercial anchors on a domain whose homepage is a generic brand page, and you've told Google the wrong thing ten times.
Google's own link best practices guidance treats links as a relevance and discovery signal, not just a trust signal — which is exactly why a deep link to a reviews page outranks a homepage link for that specific review, even when the homepage link comes from the stronger domain. Search Engine Journal's reporting on inner-page ranking makes the same case: a page competes on its own link and content signals, not just whatever authority the domain carries in aggregate.
How should the homepage-to-deep-page split actually look?
Most teams get the ratio wrong in one direction or the other. A workable baseline for a casino or sportsbook affiliate site splits new monthly links roughly like this:
- 15-25% to the homepage — enough to keep the domain's primary authority growing, never zero
- 40-55% to the commercial pages you most want to rank, including casino backlink category pages and sportsbook hubs
- 20-30% to supporting content — guides, comparisons and news posts that build topical relevance around those commercial pages
- The remainder to brand or legal pages that pick up occasional natural coverage links regardless of what you're building toward
Which pages earn deep links naturally, and which need engineered placements?
Guides, data-driven comparisons and regulatory explainers earn deep links the way the homepage never will — a journalist or blogger citing a specific statistic links to the page that has it, not to the root domain. That's the free half of the split. Commercial category and country pages almost never earn links organically, because nobody writes an article that happens to need to cite a backlink pricing page, so those need to be built deliberately through niche edits that anchor specifically to the page being promoted rather than to the brand.
This is also where anchor text strategy and page targeting have to move together. A branded anchor pointed at a deep commercial page reads naturally; the same branded anchor pointed at the homepage from an article about, say, sportsbook bonuses, reads like a mismatch the moment anyone checks where the link actually sits.
How does this interact with internal linking?
External backlinks and internal linking solve different parts of the same problem. If your homepage carries most of your external authority but barely links down into commercial pages, that authority never reaches the pages you're trying to rank — external placement and internal architecture both need fixing, not just one.
Check what's actually ranking today before rebalancing anything. A commercial page stuck on page two with thin link history is a stronger candidate for new deep links than a homepage that already ranks comfortably for its own brand terms — chasing more homepage links past that point is activity without a target.
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iGaming link building & gambling SEO
Written and fact-checked by the iGaming Links team — the people who source, vet and place gambling backlinks across a network of 60,000+ casino and mainstream domains every week. Our guidance comes from running real guest-post, niche-edit and PBN campaigns for SEO agencies, iGaming operators and affiliates, not from theory.