#1 on launch day
Observed at #1 on launch day: a sponsored guide on Jornal de Notícias.
Casino · Portugal · “melhores casinos online”
jn.pt/guia-dos-melhores-casinos-online-em-portugal-2024/ (the new guide): #1 (2024-06-04) → #1 (2024-06-04)
Source: Ahrefs ranking checks for this URL (Google Portugal), a few weeks apart. For comparison only, not plotted: before the guide, jn.pt's best position for the term was #34 (15 May 2024), on a different page. The guide was commissioned for iGaming.com (owner-confirmed).
The challenge
For “melhores casinos online” in Portugal, the comparison site the guide later linked to, melhorescasinosonline.com, sat around #39 to #58. Building that authority from scratch would take years.
What I did
I negotiated a paid guide placement with Jornal de Notícias (JN), one of the country's largest newspapers, as a test rather than a long commitment and supported it with placements such as Notícias ao Minuto the same month.
What happened
The guide went live at 09:19 on 4 June 2024. When Ahrefs checked the results page at 14:45 that afternoon, the guide ranked #1 in Google Portugal for “melhores casinos online”; melhorescasinosonline.com was #58 that day. Before the guide, jn.pt's best position for the term had been #34, on a different page. Ahrefs' next check, three weeks later, showed #4; the guide then stayed around #10–12 until December. It was a sponsored, news-hosted page and its link to melhorescasinosonline.com was nofollow in the 2024 version. It ranked on JN's authority rather than lifting the comparison site directly; that context matters.
Archive receipts
Unedited screenshots of the Internet Archive's own copies, with the capture date in its toolbar. Only the green highlight is added.
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