PokerStars has always been so far ahead of the competition because basically they get their marketing right and provide a better solution for online poker players. No matter what guarantee they put on for their tournaments, they are always smashed because they know what works and have so many players.
As an internet marketer myself I always try to look at what the big boys do and try to emulate some of the things they do in some of my own projects. One thing that has particularly sparked my attention is their WBCOOP which is basically a championship just for poker bloggers and there are a lot of them out there i’m so surprised no other site has caught onto this and atleast tried to copy it. What they do is make you add a link and banner for the event and then you get a free ticket to the tournaments. This gets PokerStars thousands of basically free links and also plenty of branding because of the banners.
I received an e-mail the other day (which is what has brought this article on) where they are now asking for bloggers to write an article containing the text which is why playing poker is clearly a game of skill with the poker being a link to their site. In exchange for this, bloggers get some goodies.
Now my question to the PokerStars marketing team is this. Why are you making bloggers write the same phrase for the text you are targeting? Does this not scream a paid text link to the search engines because all of a sudden you have hundreds of bloggers writing articles with the exact same link and surrounding text all being published at the same time. This means you will be penalised in the search engines if they detect this. Why don’t you just let the bloggers place the link themselves, then you have different surrounding text for every article? This will seem so much more natural.
When I checked the rankings for PokerStars.com in google.com I noticed you were on the first page but now you are on the 2nd page. It concerns me that you have already been penalised for this and your rankings have dropped with your top competitor Full Tilt Poker now ranking much higher than you. You are also on the 3rd page in google.co.uk which is worth practically nothing for such a competitive term.
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I’ve been doing a lot of online marketing myself and they have obviously thought about the points in your post as they are trying to rank for many different terms. Still, it’s a text link in the entry but for a whole host of search terms