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 EverestPoker.com
puzzled a lot of people when it was established in 2004. From the beginning they did not take players from the United
States. While this seemed like a money-hating decision at the time, now it looks more or less brilliant.
While all other cardrooms focused attention and resources on the mega-US market (which also coincidentally meant focusing on
Canada, Great Britain and Australia), Everest targeted smaller markets. But while smaller, they were also cheaper and had
little competition. Thinking back to 2005, to the rest of the cardrooms a place like Norway didn't exist, which left it wide
open for Everest Poker. This "go where the other guys ain't" philosophy allowed Everest to get its foot in the door,
and keep it there until the industry dynamics tilted toward the non-English speaking countries, where Everest Poker had critical
mass, which then allowed it to consolidate into one of the top six online poker rooms.
At the same time the folks behind EverestPoker.com were brilliant in their targeting foresight, they stumbled very badly in
their search marketing. Instead of dominating the non-English search results all over the globe, they are merely somewhat
above average. Their first error (now corrected) was horrible website construction -- you don't build a firm foundation on
dynamic URLs. Their second mistake was a suicidal launch of a duplicate Everest-Poker.com domain. For a brief time both
EverestPoker.com and Everest-Poker.com were in the Google top twenty for a "poker" search. Now neither can be
found in the top 100. While this situation is not nearly so dire in all languages, once again we see in search, like in poker,
greed kills. Trying to get duplicate domains to rank well usually leads to neither ranking well. |
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