Excite Story: Referrals dropping

[Brett_Tabke]

Great article on the down turn in referrals at Excite.

[pshea]

It's now late April, been submitting to these guys since Fall 1999, nothing is in since I submitted to them in October.

[Pete]

I share your pain regarding Excite. Always found it pretty easy to get good rankings on Excite and enjoyed the AOL times. Those sites have generally held their positions. But getting new ones in is another story. I contacted them and got the following two messages. Still waiting...
Any tips from the seasoned campaigners?

Thanks for contacting Excite.

I will need to see your URL before I can answer any questions. Please
send it to me, with a copy of this entire message, so I can look into it
for you.

Best Regards,

Chuck
Product Support Engineer
Excite@Home

Thanks for contacting Excite.

Regarding your issue, we cannot guarantee your site will be indexed
in our search engine. We receive hundreds of thousands of URL
submissions each day to our free search engine! Excite's free
services are growing in popularity as is our customer prescence.
We are working to accomodate each submission in a timely manner
which no other search engine has even attempted to take on. We
cannot provide a timeframe for indexing, but assure you that we
will do what we can. Your site is important to us and we thank
you for your patience and understanding.

Best Regards,

Chuck
Product Support Engineer
Excite@Home

[engine]

Oh, whoa is me! It is surprising how easy it is to screw up a good thing. I'd guess they don;t know where they are heading - it doesn't look like it's ever going to be the same (like so many other was greats) - shame.

I suppose we've got to look toward the new kids on the block (relatively) and the old favourites - Fast, Google, Yahoo, AV. Are there figures to show where the referals are going? Who are the winners?

[Brett_Tabke]

Well, there is StatMarket but you have to pay for it now and their figures are quite suspect.

[engine]

Quick summary why these might be dropping.
1. New engines/directories coming online - including local or country-specific engines. This creates competition and diluting the audience.
2. Surfers not finding the information they are seeking.
3. It's offline (not very often) and unusable.
4. Lack of promotion for the site.

So, the question is, where are the referals going? Agreed about Statmarket Brett, I too found the information a little bit suspect.

Any one with some updated info?