SEO Tracker: PokerStars appears to drop its .uk domain as poker search results get more competitive

It was an interesting year in the online poker search market in 2019, with some notable changes affecting the vertical’s biggest brand, PokerStars, that have made the market much more competitive.

PokerStars leads the market, but with a much-reduced lead

PokerStars remains the leading brand in this market, but that certainly doesn’t tell the full story.

The pokerstars.com domain has a visibility of 12,697, putting it ahead of 888poker.com, but that is significantly lower than the visibility that the brand had in April last year, where its pokerstars.uk domain generated a visibility of just over 21,500 from the 98 biggest non-brand keywords in the market.

The drop can be largely explained by that change in domain – where the .uk domain was previously the main source of traffic, the .com domain has now taken over. The latter has prominent rankings across the keyword set, ranking in the top three positions for “poker”, “poker games”, “online poker” and “Texas hold’em”.

The most visible commercial brand for the biggest keyword “poker” is 888poker.com (which sits behind Wikipedia) and 888poker.com is the second-most visible brand, with a visibility of just over 10,000.

PokerStars appears to be dropping its “double domain” approach

When we have previously looked at the online poker market, we have consistently noted that PokerStars appeared to be using two domains for the UK market, with both a pokerstars.uk and a pokerstars.com domain.

Twelve months ago, we noted that the brand was using this approach to dominate the search results, with both the .uk and .com domains taking the leading positions in the market.

Back in April 2019, we noted that the .com domain has seen significant declines in organic visibility, while the visibility of the .uk domain remained relatively consistent.

Looking at the market in December 2019, the .uk domain seems to have vanished completely. In our analysis, the domain barely registers any visibility at all.

Data from Searchmetrics also shows the way in which the brand has used the two domains and, most notably, shows the way in which both domains have essentially changed places towards the end of this year.

The .com domain saw declining fortunes throughout most of 2019, trending consistently downwards towards November 2019. However, since then, the .com domain has increased its visibility significantly, up to the previous level of the .uk, while the .uk domain has dropped to essentially zero and appears to have been deactivated entirely.

This sudden change has the hallmarks of a site migration and is an indication that the brand is now putting all of its focus on the .com domain. This certainly makes sense from a branding perspective – the .com domain is the most visible domain and is the one that is most visible on the brand’s advertising.

But the migration is not as seamless as it appears

But there are some flaws in the brand’s execution of this approach.

Any links and traffic directed at the .uk domain now return a “This site can’t be reached” timeout error message. We tried to reach the .uk domain on numerous occasions, via several links and on different devices and connections in late December and received a message informing us that the page was not available. At no point was there an attempt to redirect our visit to the .com (or any other) domain.

Why there are no redirects in place is intriguing. A cursory look at the brand’s link profile through AHREFS suggests that there is nothing out of the ordinary. The data from Searchmetrics shows a relatively smooth migration with no suggestion of a manual action penalty, so it is hard to see why there would be a deliberate decision not to redirect traffic to the primary domain.

Additionally, the brand was still running paid search ads in Google during late December. We noted ads present on two days in late December and, on both occasions, our clicks went to a connection timeout error page.

Google search result for the term “poker”, 20 December 2019

Google search result for the term “poker”, 24 December 2019

Google search result for the term “poker”, 30 December 2019.

Without a redirection process in place, the brand should not be running PPC ads for the .uk domain – the brand is paying for traffic (in our estimate, in the region of £30-40 per click) that it cannot serve. The brand should either pause activity or focus on directing paid traffic to the .com domain.

What does this mean for the poker search results?

This development appears to have already opened the UK poker search market and, over the coming months, it will be interesting to see whether PokerStars.com can continue to grow to the level that saw the brand go on to dominate the market with its old .uk domain.

The big prize is the keyword ‘poker’ and, with a non-commercial site occupying position one, any brand that can take that prime position will invariably go on to command the lion’s share of the search traffic.