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I was looking at MSN, Lycos and HotBot today and all come back with "Popular Hits" as the first ten or so -- from DirectHit.
This worries me as my sites seem to do very badly in DirectHit - eg. not indexed :(
So a couple of question/things to discuss.
- Any DirectHit tips?
- Is this something thats going to continue?
- Is DH anywhere else big?
Also the back button disabler trick? The top site for my KW's uses it... I personally hate them. Is it worth creating a page like this soley for DH in light of this?
(my first post -- been lurking a while though ;) )
Gethan
ask.com also uses directhit and I get pretty good traffic from them.
Welcome Gethan!
do any of your competitors that are listed well in DH use this technique?
Hotbot is referring traffic with a few top DH keywords, but MSN isn't for whatever reason. Maybe it's that MSN doesn't list popular sites on its SERP-- you need to click through to it. It looks like Lycos doesn't get its list of popular sites from DirectHit based on a few tests.
One tidbit that's interesting to me is that obscure keyword combinations ranking as popular in its list, DirectHit sends traffic to the home page instead of the deep link actually containing the keyword. Seems good linkage to obscure pages and a site search are necessary for DirectHit customers.
Stavs:- yep, the number one guy for my KW's. Got five stars ... 2 more than anyone else.
My evidence for a few of these "popular" seaches coming from DirectHit is that the results are the same for my KW's and it says "popular results". Also both Lycos and HotBot have the powered by DirectHit logo at the bottom of page.
I think I was probably wrong about MSN -- what I thought was happening is that MSN pulled DH results and added in LookSmart descriptions and titles for them... based on the bringing back "1-15 of about 15" on the first page, and the results.
The second page says "16-30 of 1234000" or something. Only on seacrh.msn.com -- the co.uk's so far seem uncontaminated.
Don't want to dish out my KW's here (what I really don't need is a whole load of guys better at this than me testing with my KW's to see if they can do well in DH :) ) but will look to see if I can find some innocent combination that does the same.
Looksmart -> MSN -> DirectHit
You can see that sites scoring high in MSN score high in DH.
To score high in MSN you need good title and description in LS.
You can realize this in the long time since DH reindex slower than MSN.
MSN designed it to look like a header for the results below it, which it isn't-- instead of going to an "about popular results page" it goes to a different search results page from a different database.
