Bairro Gamer

Search 'códigos blox fruits' or 'melhor build yasuo' from a Portuguese IP and the first page is Brazilian. Wrong dialect, wrong currency, wrong retailers. Eurogamer.pt has been dormant for years. The PT-PT gaming audience tolerates the BR content — they don't have an alternative — but the moment one shows up speaking their language and quoting prices in euros, the audience moves.

The brief was the alternative. A native PT-PT gaming network with the editorial standards of Eurogamer or Polygon, the SEO discipline of LigadosGames in BR, and a brand language anchored locally — bairro, not arena. Each game is a 'rua' (street), categories are 'esquinas' (corners), the editor's pick is 'a montra desta semana' (this week's window display). The metaphor lives all the way down to the URL pattern.

Monetisation: display ads + retailer affiliate (FNAC, Worten, PCDIGA, Eneba) + direct sponsorships at scale. Editorial standards published openly from day one — sponsored content always labelled, errors corrected publicly, comments moderated.

We started with the SEO surface, not the design. Mapped the long-tail PT-PT gaming query space (~500k-2M monthly searches) into a content matrix: code lists per game (refreshed weekly), evergreen build guides per champion/character, listicles, tier lists, news, free-game drops, and patch coverage. The first 90 days are 30 code listicles + 15 evergreen guides + 30 newsicle pieces — by month four, the site has ~75 indexable pages racing for rankings.

On top of that engine, the brand. The bairro metaphor took longer than the architecture: each game-hub page is styled like a Lisbon street sign (white serif text on azulejo-blue plate); the editorial colour system is sodium-amber (the colour of a Portuguese street lamp at 3 a.m.) on deep navy; small sections of category-coded micro-colour for scanning. The wordmark sits inside a blue plate when it has space; on its own when it doesn't.

Editorial voice is a *vizinho* who happens to know the meta. Informal but informed. PT-PT idiom strict — no 'vc / tá / blz'. The reader should feel the writer is one of them, not translating from English at them.

Stack: Next.js 15 with the App Router, Payload CMS for the editorial workflow (multi-author, scheduled publish, draft/preview), MDX for the actual article body so contributors can use rich primitives — embeds, callouts, comparison tables — without manual HTML. Postgres + Drizzle backs everything; storage on Cloudflare R2.

OG images are generated dynamically per article via `next/og` so every share produces a branded card. Per-game-hub pages SSG with `generateStaticParams`. The article surface uses ISR — a new article rebuilds its slug; the home and game-hub pages refresh on a soft cadence. Cache headers tuned aggressively because the workload is read-heavy.

JSON-LD coverage is exhaustive: `Article` for every post, `FAQPage` for the recurring 'Como resgatar X?' sections in code lists, `ItemList` for the listicle bodies, `BreadcrumbList` everywhere. The dynamic sitemap splits at 50k URLs and is hreflang-tagged for PT-PT explicitly. The internal-linking graph keeps every leaf within four clicks of the home.