This week, the popular Scouting Reportfrom PokerScout took a look at SEO from the major non-US online poker sites. In other words, when a prospective customer searches terms like “poker,” “online poker,” “holdem,” and “free poker,” how do the major sites stack up? And, is there a correlation between SEO visibility and liquidity? Does a poor SEO result equate to a death sentence?

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A total of 20 relevant search terms were used. PokerStarsseems to be the model of consistency in the SEO world, according to PokerScout. The Report explained, “PokerStars has performed well over an extended period of time. The site recovered from a months-long drought in the middle of 2013 and is now ranking highly again.” PokerStars, the largest poker site in the world traffic-wise, had the highest “search engine score” from PokerScout, the metric used to compare each site.

You might recall that in April, domains belonging to bwin.party suffered a 30-day Google penalty, which was allegedly in part due to link-buying. One analyst said at the time, “They have a lot of what Google is likely to deem manipulative inbound links.” PartyPokeris, as a result, near the bottom of PokerScout’s list of SEO visibility, still trying to shake off its April penalty.

Full Tilt‘s “search engine score” looks like a nauseating roller-coaster. It spiked in 2013 and actually stayed well ahead of its sister site, PokerStars, for a year-and-a-half before crashing back to Earth. Now, re-branding is apparently doing a number on its SEO.

PokerScout explained, “After the re-launch, Full Tilt rose higher than ever and stayed ahead of PokerStars for nearly 18 months. More recently, Full Tilt has been transitioning from the fulltiltpoker.com domain to fulltilt.com, which cost the site pretty heavily in the rankings.” Impressively, Full Tilt managed to hang onto its SEO rankings despite being closed for over a year starting in 2011, according to PokerScout.

Despite being the second largest site in the world according to cash game traffic, 888 Pokerhas yet to traverse the SEO trail successfully. “888 proves that high rankings aren’t required to be successful,” PokerScout summarized. “Both the old domain (pacificpoker.com) and the new one (888poker.com) have achieved relatively little in the top poker search terms, even as the site has risen to become the second largest in the world.”

There you have it. Special thanks to PokerScout for the data and information contained in this article.

PokerScout’s Scouting Report is a daily newsletter for the online poker industry, with in-depth data and analysis of the market. More information can be found by clicking here or contacting support@pokerscout.com.

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