|
 FullTiltPoker.com
is one of the three largest online poker cardrooms. Even though it is roughly only half the size of PokerStars.com, in terms of its
offline marketing, Full Tilt has outpaced its competitors. TV commercials, multiple made-for-television tournaments, above average
promotion of its endorsing personalities... Full Tilt Poker has made itself a household brand name.
On the other hand, their online marketing is a mixed bag. Overall the search performance of their domains is poor, but for high
profile searches of [poker] and [online poker], Full Tilt does quite well, including getting an extremely improbable
"expanded listing"
for an [online poker] search. These expanded listings usually go to sites that have a stranglehold dominance of the term
--
like Pokertips.org has for a [poker tips] search. Full Tilt's fortunes for a [poker] search are more erratic. They have been
in almost all spots between #1 and #14.
This volatility may be due largely to the outsourcing of their SEO to short-term, spammy thinkers. Their forum spamming at
one point reached comical depths (see May 21st post).
More serious is the company's spammy link buying on the Turkish language
Cimnasturk.com, Sfgate.com/sports,
Infoplease.com/sports.html and most blatantly of all, Topix.net. While all these are the egregiously spammy link buys that Matt Cutts
of Google says can lose the linking site its ability to pass reputation and pagerank, the worst part of this is ALL the above examples
run Google Adsense, in direct violation of Adsense's terms and conditions, which say you can't run Adsense on sites that link to online
gambling sites. Yeah, right.
Full Tilt seems to be going down the path that sunk Party Poker a few years ago -- thinking they have to make every nickel
they can this month because they might not make a cent after that. This shortsighted thinking cost Party $100,000,000+
(click the Party Poker link at the left for details). In the coming months we'll see how it works out for Full Tilt. |
|
