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Current Search Engine News Millions in Transactions from the Internet 5/15/00
The Latest on the Search Engines 5/15/00 Less Than 5% of Real Estate Websites Successful 4/11/00
February 14, 2001
Changes within the search engine industry are increasing the cost of Internet marketing. Over the past four months most of the top search engines have introduced paid submission services. While many still have a free URL submission page they are not indexing most of the pages that are submitted through this free service. In an article by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch we learned that the managers at the engines believe that as much as 90% of the pages submitted through the free submission service are spam. The engines are now using a new spyder (the program that collects pages from the web) that follows links from page to page and in that way avoids spam pages. The assumption is that a page that is linked to other pages around the web is not a spam page. In part, what this means is that your pages, if linked to pages on other web sites, will eventually get indexed. In the mean time, sites submitted via the paid submission program are indexed within a week by the primary search engine (Looksmart and Yahoo) but it may be several weeks to a month before the affiliated engines pick up the site. In reviewing our current submission records we find that HotBot has not indexed any pages since November and Excite has been very slow to include new sites. Each of the engines has a different schedule on updating their database and it is often several months between updates.
So, in order to expedite the indexing of your web site you can expect to spend at least $398 in submitting to the two primary directories. And even after this it will require four to six weeks to see the site appear in all the major engines. It is still necessary to submit the site to the Open Directory in order to get placement in AOL.
November 15, 2000
Update November 20th
Update It has just been announced by The GoTo search engine that they have concluded deals with AOL, AltaVista, Lycos and HotBot to have the top listings on GoTo appear at the top of the search results on these engines. This means that the top GoTo positions (top two or top three) will be appearing on search results representing approximately 60% of the total search engine industry traffic. It is unknown at this time just what the impact will be on the regular page one listings on these engines. We are curently monitoring a number of web sites that have top positions on these engines as well as GoTo.
The evolution of the search engine industry continues with many significant changes that confirm the trend towards increasing costs for web site owners. One of the latest changes is a move towards charging fees for submissions and an expansion of the "bid for position" concept. LookSmart and Altavista are now charging($199) for submissions to their directories. They have been joined by MSN and Excite ($199) in this new fee based submission process. In most cases it is still possible to be indexed within these engines but the most effective way is to pay for the submission that will place your web site in the directory.
The new arrangement between AOL and GoTo places the top three links from the GoTo search results at the top of the search results on AOL. While we are in the process of evaluating the effectiveness this arrangement it is already evident that these links are drawing traffic away from the regular links lower on the page. We will report on our findings over the next month. The bid prices for top positions under the real estate category are indicative of the value of these visitors. Top prices are exceeding $2.00 per click through and the median seems to be around $1.00. We expect that as traffic builds from the AOL links the prices will go even higher.
As we monitor the traffic across more than 3,000 real estate web pages we are seeing a growing volume of traffic from MSN. A page one position on the MSN search engine is often drawing more visitor traffic than any other search engine. The comparative visitor traffic statistics between the search engines has changed over the past six months. The actual visitor traffic patterns runs contrary to the reported volumes of the search engines.
April 11, 2000
In recent months developments on the search engines have continued. AltaVista, HotBot and Lycos are now screening webpage submissions and filtering out frontdoor pages, promotional pages and promotional domains. A common strategy used by search engine optimizers and webmasters to get more page one positions, these techniques are considered spam. It is becoming more and more difficult to place pages at the top of the search results. For those website owner who have been doing their own promotional work it is evermore difficult. The decision to hire a consultant or company to promote search engine traffic is becoming more a question of finding someone who has available time. Many companies have already max'd out and are not accepting additional clients.
January 10, 2000
Since last August there have been radical changes within the search engine industry. First AOL dropped the Excite search engine and switched to using the database from the Open Directory. Excite's market share dropped from 28% to less than 10%. Then, in a series of changes, other search engines switched to a directory format with many also using data from the Open Directory. MSN was using the Inktomi data base and then switched to AltaVista. Then, in December, they switched back to Inktomi. A new comer, Iwon.com joined the competition in the late fall and has drawn considerable traffic from the other engines. Iwon.com advertises on TV with ads promoting a million dollar monthly give away.
As all of this was happening other search engines have been promoting traffic and causing a further shift in traffic away from the leaders. AltaVista and Yahoo remain the strong leaders with Lycos in a strong position behind them. GoTo, a search engine that sells page positions to the highest bidder, is gaining in the battle for visitors.
June 30, 1999
Over the past six months it has become increasingly difficult to place pages at the top of the search results. Changes in the search engine algorithms have created such wide differences between the engines that it is almost necessary to design individual pages specifically for each search engine. Plus, the competition for top positions has become much greater with many more sites now being optimized to achieve top positions. This means that it is becoming progressively more expensive to maintain pages at the top of the results. It is only a matter of time before we see the necessity of "buying" positions or advertising space. Directories, that up until now have offered free links, will begin to charge a fee and professional search engine placement services will be raising their prices.
AltaVista is now going through changes that include it being spun off from Compaq Computer. An IPO is in the making at this time. There have been problems in recent months as when someone searched using the phrase "real estate" the engine return an "ignored" results.... most recently this engine has begun to produce results under this phrase but, they all appear to be only pages that were indexed since June 17th.
It is also evident that this engine has changed it policy and is limiting the number positions it gives any one page. Used to be that a single page would be listed under many different combinations of keywords and would thereby provide good coverage. We haven't determined the actual number of listings for a page but it is now perhaps a third of what it used to be.
One of our recent observations is that many of the top pages have little content and are often just "entry" pages. It would appear that AltaVista is using an algorithm that does not contain a minimum required number of words on a page. So, it is possible to achieve a high ratio of keywords within the page content.
InfoSeek has also made changes that have absolutely flip flopped the search results. Pages that used to consistently earn top positions have disappeared. It seems that this engine has chosen to give a high ranking to popular pages (pages that have many links TO them). So, here there is a considerable value in having many links to your site from other websites.
HotBot is undergoing changes. They are currently quoting a lead time for indexing of 60 days. With the new relationship with Lycos both of these engines are going through changes. HotBot uses the Inkotomi database and has been giving good results. Watch for changes in the near future. Lycos is switching over to a directory format like Yahoo. It is using the Open Directory that has been in development over the past year. This is the directory used by Netscape. There are indications that HotBot is also making a move to categorize its database.
AOLnetfind will be changing over to the Inkotomi Database using a proprietary search engine. This will occur within the next two months. This will be a big change as to date it has been a duplication of the Excite search results. We also anticipate changes that will occur because of AOL's acquisition of Netscape.
MSNsearch continues to use the Inkotomi database and is again accepting URL submissions. It only accepts one page from a domain each day. Go-To seems to be developing greater traffic and is producing progressively better results for it's paid positioning. In this search engine one bids for dollars for hits and earns positioning based upon the bid price.
The Excite search engine has been relatively stabile in recent months with no major changes. It continues to cleanse its' database on about a six week cycle when it drops many pages. This is supposedly being done to limit the size of the database to 50 million pages. Recent news articles report that there is an intention to increase the database but we haven't seen an indication of this.
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