Consolidating 888casino.ro, 888poker.ro and 888sport.ro into 888.ro, URL by URL, and taking organic traffic from about 110K to a 220K peak

888 Romania was consolidating three product domains, 888casino.ro, 888poker.ro and 888sport.ro, into a single 888.ro. Each legacy domain carried years of rankings, links and content: the casino domain alone had 2.53 million Google Search Console clicks in the previous twelve months, the poker domain a strategy library of nearly 200 pages, the sport domain a blog that was its main organic driver and thousands of ephemeral match URLs.

The new platform did not mirror the old ones. There were no poker sub-pages, no blog, several games and five sports were gone, and some game slugs had changed. A migration mapped by pattern alone would have sent real traffic to the wrong place or to nothing.

A full technical audit of 888.ro first, the same shape as the one below for Winner.ro: crawl, indexation, canonicals, rendering, crawl budget, sitemaps and schema, so the destination was sound before anything was pointed at it.

Then the migration plan, one workbook per legacy domain. Every URL with real traffic (12-month GSC clicks) or real links (Ahrefs referring domains) got a one-to-one destination, a redirect type, a match type and a confidence level: 548 URLs for casino, 282 for poker, 705 for sport out of 2,737 crawled. Where the new site had no equivalent, the mapping says so explicitly: hand-ranking guides with 10,500 clicks and a download page with 3,461 clicks that fall back to /poker, blog posts with 35,184 clicks that fall back to the sport home, and the decision is left for the client to make with the numbers in front of them.

The long tail was handled by rule, not by row: 42 catch-all regex patterns for football, tennis, hockey, handball, esports and the removed sports, Romanian and English variants both, so thousands of expired match and tournament URLs land on the right category. 1,504 dead URLs (404 and 410) were documented and kept out of the map on purpose.

Each workbook closes with an issues-and-risks register: non-www and http variants carrying 1,000+ referring domains that need server-side chains verified, a help subdomain that needs a subdomain-level redirect, promotion URLs with 420 to 594 referring domains, URLs GSC knew about that no crawl had found, and the places where Ahrefs estimates and real GSC data disagreed by an order of magnitude.

The redirects went live in early April 2026. Ahrefs shows organic traffic to 888.ro dipping to about 55K on the day of the switch, recovering within a week to above where it had been, then climbing through the summer to a 220K peak in late August, roughly double the 100K to 110K the domain had held for the six months before the migration.

Ahrefsclick to enlarge

A consolidation is judged by what it does not lose. This one lost a week, then gained the combined authority of three domains on one.