Update on Best Online Poker Sites

It has been exactly a month since my last post on changing the url from PokerSplendor.com to BestOnlinePokerSites.com.

A day after my last post, both sites disappeared from the index. Best Online Poker Sites then showed up a day later (poker splendor was taken out of the index) but was on the second page for “poker sites” along with most of the other long tail keywords. After a  few days the sites position improved but didn’t have the exact same rankings as before but was holding on to the 10 spot on the first page for “poker sites”.

It stayed at the 10 position for a couple weeks until Friday (6/18/2010) which was the first time I think google put the site back into it’s original position at 7.

Overall the traffic hasn’t changed much from before and after the switch. A lot of the long tail keywords followed the same path as the poker sites keyword. I would definitely forward another site if I thought I had a much better domain for a site. It was a bit of a hassle to email linking sites about my url changing but it didn’t take long.

Interesting to note that Bing still shows Poker Splendor while Yahoo has updated it’s index and shows BOPS.  To be fair, I used google webmasters to let google know of the site being redirected (along with the htaccess 301) while with bing I didn’t use their webmaster center.

PokerSplendor.com is now BestOnlinePokerSites.com

I decided recently that I was going to move Poker Splendor to a new domain. When I created Poker Splendor I wanted to make it a bit more interesting then just another poker portal. I added a couple eye-catching pictures and made a couple sections that were different from the norm including the Las Vegas section.

Though, recently I decided that I liked the site but would rather have a domain that had keywords that I am targeting. So I purchased the domain Best Online Poker Sites and on Monday (5/17) switched the site to it via 301 redirects.

Google has already cached the new site and has 40 pages in the index. It also still has the Poker Splendor cache so I am still getting the same amount of traffic to the site. I have a feeling over the next couple days the Poker Splendor cache will disappear and hopefully my new domain will take it’s place. Though, I have heard that for a bit I may lose some of my serp positions as google makes the switch.

I will make another post in about a month with an update to how the 301 redirect went and if my traffic levels and serp positions changed.

Holidays and January Trips

Hope everyone had a good holiday.

I want to thank Bodog for sending me 3 bottles of wine & CasinoCoins for sending me a Bose portable iPod speaker. 2009 was the first year that I received holiday presents from programs and they will likely get increased exposure because of it. Though in 2008, Aced.com paid for a Las Vegas trip…which was a sick trip and is by far the best thing I have received from an affiliate company.

January Trips

January is a busy month, it started with celebrating New Years in Tahoe. Then January 15-18th I will be in Las Vegas at an annual MLK trip with friends.  On January 25th I will be leaving for Europe and attending the London Affiliate Conference as well as doing some traveling in Europe after the conference. On the flight back from Europe I will be stopping at Washington DC and will spend 3 days there and will be back in Santa Cruz (my home town) on the 7th of Feb.

Free SEO Gambling Traffic

There will always be a lot of discussion by affiliates about the percentage of traffic that they convert. I have found real money player conversions (from your site to real money players) has a lot to do with keywords. There are definitely other site factors including calls to action, programs you are promoting, banners used…etc. But in the end, I think if you have the best keywords (online poker, online casino) you will convert more traffic than the most optimized free casino/poker site.

I think most people realize that “free” is a really low converting keyword but there is a lot of traffic for it. So how bad can it really be?

I created a site to target a “free” (casino/poker) site and here are the stats so far:

Clicks: 719

Unique Downloads: 35

Sign-ups: 30

New Depositors: 0

Yep, no conversions…This doesn’t mean that later down the road there won’t be any real money conversions as this is a small sample size of time and players. Though, I can definitely say that “free” keywords aren’t a get rich quick type of keyword. Also, the program that I was sending the traffic through has done really well in the past with converting players so I don’t think it’s the program…Although, I may try sending the traffic to another program to see if I will get better results.

2009 WSOP Satellites Graphs and Banners

Update (8/5/09): Since the poker sites have stopped running tournaments for the 2009 WSOP the widgets are now blank. I will do this again for the 2010 WSOP Main Event satellite seats.

The biggest promotion that all poker affiliates are pushing (or should be) is the 2009 WSOP Satellites. It is a great way to attract new or even established poker players as many know the stories of Moneymaker and all the past Main Event winners who became millionaires over night.

I have created a couple widgets and banners for seats given away for the 2009 WSOP Satellite Main Event at both Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker.

I am allowing affiliates to use them for a link back on that page or another high quality page on the site (excluding link pages or pages with minimal content).

They are updated every 15 minutes and can easily be inserted into any website since they are iframes.

If you would like to use them send me an email: kdollar (at) gmail.com. I will then email you a text file with all the iframe codes for the graphs and the banners as well as linking options.

All the possible WSOP Main Event graphs:

http://www.pokersatellitestrategy.com/widgets/

All the possible WSOP Main Event banners:

http://www.pokersatellitestrategy.com/widgets/banners/