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 Besides the
major cardrooms (linked in the lower left), there are hundreds of "skins" that portal players into a couple dozen
online poker networks. These skins are essentially super affiliates of the actual cardroom. At first glance, they seem to fall
somewhere between information sites and real cardrooms, but in reality they are more like what a search engine would consider
a "doorway page". They usually do have some unique value of their own, but in general if they disappeared tomorrow,
the world would not notice. Some of the larger skin sites are major players when it comes to search engine ranks and marketing.
TitanPoker.com
Titan Poker is part of Playtech's iPoker network. There is no clearly "main" cardroom in this group, but Titan comes the
closest. At the time of this writing Titan Poker is suffering under an English Google 950 penalty. I suspect this is due to some
quite inappropriate link buying from Linux.org and many college newspapers. They only have themselves to blame for this one.
PokerRoom.com
The lead cardroom in bwin's OnGame network, PokerRoom.com has by far the most dominant search presence of any cardroom skin --
which makes sense since it really isn't a skin. PokerRoom.com was a long established cardroom before some other skins were added.
Poker Room held the #1 result for a poker search for much of 2004 through 2006, and their growth reflected that. They also dominated
"online poker" searches. It wouldn't be wrong to say that "PokerRoom.com is the cardroom search marketing built."
ParadisePoker.com
Sportingbet's Paradise Poker owned 85 to 90% of the online poker market 1999 to 2001. Devastated by the passage of the
Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act,
Paradise is now a skin of the Boss Media network. Paradise is important in the context of this site for establishing the playing field
that all the other cardrooms now play on. They were a white hat site in a broad industry where their cousin casino sites would spam
a needlepoint site just so they could get one player every five years. The poker market is far cleaner than the casino side partly
due to Paradise's non-spamming attitude. On the other hand, Paradise took its position as a market leader for granted and did next
to no search marketing, instead relying on market leading information sites to do that work for them. This cost them dearly when
they lost their "everybody plays at Paradise" market leadership. They didn't have the search marketing power that a mature,
respected site should have had, so they could not keep up with other sites who poured millions into offline marketing. Information
sites thrived in the poker boom despite greater competition. Paradise withered to near death because the sites they relied on for
search traffic now parceled it out to many cardrooms.
Bodog.com
Not a skin, but Bodog doesn't seem to know what it wants to do from one minute to the next. Does it want to be a bad boy,
bad reputation, "cool" site that doesn't mind risking spamming... or does it want to settle into being a mature,
successful, well-known business. Five minutes after I write this they may go flying off in one direction or the other.
AbsolutePoker.com - UltimateBet.com
Ever wonder what it would be like to own two large cardrooms without any semblance of a search engine strategy? No need to
wonder, look no further than the two cardrooms owned by Tokwiro Enterprises. Even though I say that though, Ultimate Bet
sometimes can appear in the top 10 for a [poker] search, which does attest to the value of having aged domains that have
acquired natutal links over a period of years. |
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