Publisher partnerships in two very different markets.

The challenge

Portugal and Brazil share a language and not much else. Portugal has a small pool of trusted national publishers and every competitor is knocking on the same doors. Brazil has a huge, fragmented media scene where the real risk is spending money in the wrong places. Portugal has licensed online gambling since 2015. Brazil was preparing its licensing regime in 2024, has run a licensed-only market since January 2025 and tightened the rules again in 2026, with stricter advertising standards and a review of licensing. Both markets were also shifting under Google's 2024 updates.

My role

As Senior Off-Page SEO Manager I owned the link strategy for both markets and worked with the on-page, technical, content, analytics, finance and commercial teams to make it land. That meant publisher research and negotiation, budgets and risk, outreach, delivery, quality assurance and indexing checks.

The decisions

In Portugal the question was often the format as much as the price: a sponsored article, a branded channel or a subfolder inside a national newspaper. I weighed each on editorial control, CMS access, exclusivity, link attributes, contractual risk and Google's site reputation abuse policy and negotiated a paid content test with one of the country's largest newspapers rather than committing up front. The guide went live on 4 June 2024 and, hours later, was observed at #1 in Google Portugal for “melhores casinos online” (a single Ahrefs check; three weeks later it showed #4).

In Brazil I worked with sports and editorial publishers at scale and explored larger integrated media proposals combining content, homepage visibility and promotion, alongside ordinary editorial placements.