Conversion Matters

Imagine this, you invest heavily in branding, marketing and search engine optimisation, only to have your primary domain name ‘given away’ by a court.

While this may sound like an unlikely horror story it has in fact happened to online gaming company Bodog. I saw this story on Daven’s blog - it caught my eye because I used to play a fair bit of online poker and bodog had seemed like one of the slicker poker sites.

How did Bodog lose their domain names?

A company name 1st Technology LLC filed a lawsuit against Bodog Entertainment Group S.A., Bodog.net and Bodog.com. The lawsuit centered around the software used by Bodog, which apparently infringes upon 1st Technology’s patents.

No Bodog representatives attended the hearing, which is possibly due to Bodog not being a US company, and feeling they were not covered by US laws, or possibly due to fear of arrests if they stepped onto American soil. Either way, a default judgment was giving in favor of 1st Technology LLC, which amongst other things resulted in DNS problems for Bodog and all their domains going down.

I’m not entirely clear how a software patent infringement could result in domains/DNS records being handed over but this is what has happened.

There don’t seem to be many hard facts available but speculation surrounds the fact that the central records for .com domains are held in America. It all seems quite murky.

What does the future hold for Bodog?

The poker/online gaming industry is hyper-competitive and to succeed one needs to invest heavily in both search engine optimisation and offline marketing. Google shows just under 2000 backlinks for bodog.com and I’m aware of considerable offline marketing in various poker publications.

There are no backlinks according to Google for newbodog.com and all their marketing points potential users to bodog.com. If they can’t overturn the judgment they will be faced with rebuilding their brand around a whole new domain name and the task of optimising that domain name for exposure in the SERPs.

This is no small task and I feel very sorry for them.

There’s quite a bit of discussion on webmaster world if you want more information.

Technorati Tags: bodog, poker, seo, marketing, domains, dns, lawsuit