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 Cardplayer.com
is one of the oldest poker information sites online (registered in 1995), and despite being ranked first (circa May 2007) in
Hitwise and Compete.com, and third by Quantcast among poker
portal sites, it remains perhaps the most under-producing site on the entire Internet in terms of revenue -- this despite
the site generating millions of dollars a year.
Sounds hard to manage those contradictions, but while Cardplayer generates a lot of visitors via the offline marketing
of its popular magazine, its search engine presence is abysmal.
From 1999 to about 2003, Cardplayer should have dominated every aspect of poker search, both because of reputation and
extremely deep content, which of course then would have set it up to continue to dominate in the much more competitive
years 2004 and afterwards. Fortunately for everyone else, they built a series of chaotic sites that were aggressively
unfriendly to search engines. The current site remains search-unfriendly, but the popularity of the magazine, the
quality of content and the easy to remember name lead to the website managing to get high traffic anyway.
Even though the site is positioned to hold the title of the most successful information site online, Card Player's time
to dominate has passed. The largest online card room's now have the resources to generate valuable content even faster
than Cardplayer, while also being able to convert visitors into revenue directly. A lot of successful sites exist today
because Cardplayer did not take the Internet seriously when it should have -- meaning today too. |
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