Why We Launched New Games On Separate Domains

When we launched our site, Solitaired, we were going to focus on creating a fun destination to play classic solitaire, also called klondike solitaire. Early on though, we came across an opportunity to acquire over 500 different solitaire games.

Creating those games ourselves would have taken over a year, so we jumped on the opportunity and added the games to our site.

Our thinking was as we grew users to our main site, these same users would find our new games and start playing with them.

Reality did not meet expectations. While some people played our games like Spider and Freecell, along with some of our other long tail games, game play was minimal.

We realized that our focus was on marketing our classic solitaire game on our homepage, and not these other games. How then can we get traction for them?

We knew that domains that have a keyword in its title tend to rank better. It’s a clear indication to Google on what the site is about.

What if we created new domains around these games? Of course, if we did that, we'd have to manage over 500 domains, which would be untenable.

We started researching which solitaire games, outside of classic solitaire, are the most popular. Here are the top 10 games based on Google searches:
 

After Spider and Freecell, there is a pretty clear drop off. After looking at the competitive landscape of those games, we decided to launch two new domains, Spider Solitaire Challenge and Freecell Solitaire Challenge.

Our hope is these sites can gain more traction, given the specific naming of the domains, compared to the same games on Solitaired where they are one of 500 games. It will take some time to find out, but we’re optimistic.