When I added the first water color sorting game to my main game portal, I did what most developers do: I tagged it, categorized it, and moved on.
Six months later I had a dozen sorting games on the site, a noticeable chunk of traffic coming specifically from sorting-related search queries, and a growing suspicion that I was underserving that audience by burying their content inside a general portal.
That suspicion became SortFun.
The SEO case for topical authority
Google's approach to ranking content has shifted significantly toward what SEOs call topical authority — the idea that a site which covers a specific subject comprehensively will outrank a site that covers the same subject shallowly, even if the larger site has more overall domain authority.
For a general game portal, this creates a structural problem. A site that covers action games, puzzle games, racing games, sports games, and sorting games is authoritative about none of them. It's a generalist competing against specialists for every query it targets.
The math on this became clear when I looked at my search console data. My sorting game pages were getting impressions for queries like "water color sort game" and "ball sort puzzle online," but the click-through rates were lower than I expected. The pages were showing up, but something was making users choose a competitor's result instead.
Part of that was positioning. A page on a general portal that happens to have sorting games is a less convincing answer to "I want to play sorting games" than a site called SortFun where every single page is a sorting game.
Taxonomy as product decision
The more interesting engineering decision was how to categorize the games on the new site.
Traditional game portals organize by genre: puzzle, action, strategy, casual. These categories map onto how games are made, not how players think about what they want to play. A player who wants to sort colored balls into tubes doesn't think "I want a puzzle game." They think "I want that satisfying sorting thing."
SortFun organizes by mechanic instead of genre. Water sorting. Ball sorting. Tile sliding. Color matching with a sorting constraint. Each category describes what you actually do, not what shelf it belongs on in a game store.
This distinction matters for SEO because search queries reflect player intent, and player intent is usually mechanic-based. "Water sort puzzle" gets searched. "Casual puzzle game" gets searched less specifically. Building the taxonomy around mechanics means the category pages naturally align with how players actually search.
The single codebase across multiple sites problem
Running multiple specialized sites from a solo developer position creates a maintenance question that's worth thinking through before you commit to the architecture.
My games are built in Cocos Creator. The web builds are static file bundles — HTML, JavaScript, assets — that I deploy to subdirectories on each site. There's no shared runtime dependency between sites, which means a change to the SortFun deployment doesn't affect PhyFun or 2 Player Fun.
The tradeoff is that site-level infrastructure changes — navigation updates, footer changes, sitemap regeneration — have to be applied to each site independently. For two or three sites this is manageable. At ten sites it would become a maintenance burden that outweighs the SEO benefits of separation.
My current threshold: a separate site is justified when the target keyword cluster is large enough to support 50+ unique pages, the mechanic focus is distinct enough that a general portal visitor would feel lost, and the domain name can match the primary keyword naturally. SortFun clears all three. A hypothetical site just for brick-breaker games probably doesn't.
What the data showed after launch
The topical authority hypothesis held up. Within a few months of launching SortFun as a standalone domain, the sorting game pages that had previously been buried on a general portal were ranking higher for their target queries than the equivalent pages on the main site, despite the main site having significantly more overall backlinks.
The click-through rate improved as well. A result from SortFun.com for a sorting game query is immediately legible — the domain name tells you exactly what you're going to get. A result from a general portal requires the user to evaluate whether that portal's version of the game is worth clicking over the other results. Specificity removes that friction.
The tradeoff you're actually making
Splitting content across multiple specialized sites is a bet that topical authority compounds faster than domain authority. For broad, competitive queries, that bet is probably wrong — you want all your link equity concentrated in one domain. For narrow, underserved query clusters, it can be right.
Sorting games is a narrow, underserved cluster. The queries are specific, the competition is thinner than in broader puzzle game categories, and players who want sorting games want a lot of sorting games — they're not one-and-done visitors.
The site is at sortfun.com if you want to see how the taxonomy ended up in practice.
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