SEO Tracker: Has PokerStars’ double-domain approach backfired?

Back in December 2018, we reported on how PokerStars was dominating the organic search results for online poker. The brand had a visibility of just under 55,500 – more than seven times the visibility of the next biggest brand and more than the next 50 commercial poker search listings combined. The driver of that success, our analysis found, was that the brand was ranking prominently across two domains; pokerstars.uk and pokerstars.com. Their domains ranked in positions one and two in the organic search results, ensuring that the brand was generating huge volumes of traffic from organic search.

However, five months on, things have changed.

Pokerstars.uk remains strong while the .com domain drops

PokerStars is still the dominant brand in the market, with Pokerstars.uk generating a visibility of just over 21,500 from the 98 biggest non-brand keywords in the market.

But what is striking is just how much visibility the brand has lost in the search results due to the decline in visibility from its .com domain.

Visibility for the .uk domain is actually at a very similar level to the level that we analysed back in December (a slight drop from 24,024 to 21,557), but the .com domain has seen significant falls, dropping from 31,474 to just 8,036. Whilst that still makes it the third biggest domain in the market, behind 888poker.com, it represents a significant drop in visibility.

Much of this is down to the .com domain losing visibility completely for the keyword term ‘poker’ – a term that generated around 9,000 organic non-brand clicks from the position two ranking that it held back in December. There are other examples of lower-volume keywords where the brand has also lost visibility, including the term ‘play poker’.

Independent data from Searchmetrics supports the idea that the .com domain has seen some notable drops in visibility in the last six months, with the visibility of the .com domain being extremely volatile over that period.

Since the analysis that we performed in December 2018, the visibility of the respective domains have tended to oppose each other to a consistent degree – as the .com domain has declined, the .uk domain has grown to a similar degree, and vice versa.

There are a number of potential stories behind this activity and indeed it is hard to gauge definitively while the search results remain particularly volatile. However, the most likely explanation at this stage is that there is still ambiguity from Google’s perspective about which domain is most suitable to UK users. The .com domain is the stronger domain in terms of URL Rating and Domain Authority, but also has a much higher proportion of lower-quality links. This may be one explanation for the.uk consistently out-ranking it for UK-based searches.

888Poker and the Full Tilt big gainers

The decline of the pokerstars.com domain has aided both 888poker.com and fulltilt.com, which have both seen big gains.

In the case of the latter, the brand has doubled its visibility to be among the leading brands in the market, having been outside the top 10 back in December. The second most visible brand, 888poker, has increased its visibility by 28%.

Unibet and Grosvenor Casinos are other notable entrants into the top 10 most visible brands, while notable brands that have dropped out of the top 10 include Sky Poker, Coral, Betfair, Paddy Power and PartyPoker.com – which was previously one of the leading brands in the market.

One notable addition to the market leaders is the free site 247freepoker.com, which is now the fifth most visible brand in the online poker market after seeing close to a five-fold increase in its search visibility. This is the first time that we have seen a free site in such a prominent position and while it is common to see affiliates performing well in this market, it is unusual to see free sites outranking such prominent pay-to-play brands.