Marchex Unveils Network

... of 100,000 local US sites

[buckworks]

MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) - Marchex Inc. said on Wednesday it is looking to make a splash in the local U.S. online advertising market by introducing 100,000 memorable Web sites featuring local services such as ... The Seattle-based company is looking to attract Web surfers to easy-to-remember Web domains it has acquired in recent years

[reuters.com...]

[Edwin]

For a company worth $600 million, this is a bold move. I once tried this years ago with 75 domains, got 50 million page indexed and promptly penalized. Taking that same approach today, even with great domains, sounds silly.

It's only silly if they already get a meaningful amount of traffic from the SEs. If their traffic is almost all from typeins at the moment, then the worst case is that they're out the development fee (although traffic may start to grow anyway if at least *some* visitors have a "good" experience from their site visits and link to the sites, blog about them, email them to friends, etc.) since that typein traffic will never stop, no matter what content is on the domains.

On the other hand, the upside is much much greater since they could in a perfect case scenario end up with 1 billion indexed pages sitting on on-target, keyword-rich domains. A fantastic net for trawling the long-to-very-long tail of local search!

[dougs]

Isn't this the stuff the ozzy boys at www.fabulous.com have been doing for years?

Whats the difference?

DougS

[AhmedF]

Not even close dougs.

That is pure parking. This is meta-content.

[Kurgano]

The official marchex site makes some pretty bold claims. Visit the site and a folder called /network/ and they claim 200,000 sites as well as 16% of the total internet traffic per month. 31 million unique visitors per month.

[edited by: Kurgano at 5:19 am (utc) on July 8, 2007]

[Kurgano]

It didn't take very long but the PR has started falling off many of the Marchex network sites already apparently. Of the 4 featured sites used as examples on their main site 3 now have no PR at all. The 4th has lost pr from all but the index page.

I can't say that I'm surprised though, even the example pages are primarily filled with sponsored links as content. 3 years too late for this kind of thing imo.

[jmccormac]

These could be the opening shots in a Balkanisation of the web's advertising market as it applies to parked and direct navigation sites. Many of the direct navigation networks are extremely vulnerable to this kind of search engine freeze-out. (One of the important aspects of creating a good search engine index involves wroting good parsers to rip such sites out of an index automatically.) It would not be unthinkable that most of the direct navigation sites would have been penalised or deleted from search engine indices.

The logical evolution of search engine toolbars and browsers is that their designers could begin filtering direct navigation networks as noise. (It is already possible with phishing sites.) The question is would the users even worry if they are getting a better web experience?

Regards...jmcc

[walkman]

The bad part about advertising the launching of a link farm /scrapper sites /100K linked domains: Google employess read the PR too. I would guess that they have written a special script to nuke Marchex ...

Marchex Job Openings:
...must be familiar with filing Google reinclusion requests...

[Kurgano]

Marchex is a nasdaq listed company with 120 + million in revenue last year, google can't just nuke them all quickly or there will be a very public lawsuit in which Marchex will find allies.

Is this raising the old issue of conflict of interests google raised a few years ago? Google wants an unbiased search engine but google advertises on the index it creates.

I agree, advertising 100,000 new sites overnight that all look the same and all have more sponsored links than other text wasn't a great idea. On the other hand I had no clue who Marchex was until they did it.

[Kurgano]

I wanted to add this too. Simple math. 120 million in revenue over 200,000 sites is 50 dollars per site a month in revenue. They have a great deal of room for improvement, most webmasterworld members have had better success per site.

[jmccormac]

The bad part about advertising the launching of a link farm /scrapper sites /100K linked domains: Google employess read the PR too. I would guess that they have written a special script to nuke Marchex

It is often as simple (for a search engine developer) as just dropping all websites with their DNS on the target's (in this case Marchex) DNS. This is why parking and other affiliate marketing has evolved to use the frame src HTML tags in webpages to forward to the parking/affiliate site. This has led to search engine developers writing parsers that automatically remove websites using frame src to forward to a parking page from the index. Some operators of small ranges of parked/PPCed websites try to hide their links to PPC advertising but there are other (often proprietary) methods work in these cases. Smaller search engine developers (ccTLD and niche) tend to be far more ruthless than Google or Yahoo in keeping search indices clean.

Regards...jmcc

[Kurgano]

Quote from the search marketing page -
"We place listings on the top search engines, directories and shopping engines."

I assume that means paid listings as in they advertise? I couldn't find any anywhere. Everyones site is placed on those listings for free, eventually, so they must mean they advertise their ring of sites right?

Quote from over 140,000 of the sites -
"Discover the best businesses and services based on ratings and reviews we've gathered from across the Web!"

very clever, that line is placed up top on most of the sites. Search for the entire line without quotes and you'll see just how many sites have it. it covers business, service, ratings, review etc as keywords. They add "Your unique local guide to (enter site target here)" in front of it and voila. great for seo.

There is no unique content, the majority of the page is simply sponsored links and links to the other sites. There is a rate it script in place and a "write a review" that sends you off site.

Why am I still writing about this? if Marchex sites don't completely fall from the serps with the current quality of most of their sites we're all doing something wrong. I want to know what.

[Calculus]

Sounds like a potential house of cards to me.

As an investor this is one stock that's ripe for one of those 25% gap down openings sometime over the next few years.

And why if they have all these domains and the value of domains is supposed to have, AND been going through the roof over the last 18 months has their stock price not moved for around 2.5 years?

All time high about $26, now under $15.

The way some people have been hyping the price of domains and their future potential you'd expect this to be at least a $100 stock by now.

The stockmarket is not often wrong you know.