Should we concern ourselves with European meta engines?

That is the question. And the answer is.....

[rencke]

In the Netherlands discussion, Hitman just quoted something I wrote on April 3:

... Meta engines are not interesting from an SEO point of view and if their only directory is ODP, then they have no independent platform of their own.

Hitman then states the opposite view:

In my opinion, the Meta SE's *should* be important to the SEO community. They each have their own way of ranking the results from the engines they get and may or may not filter the results. For example: try Ixquick. Ixquick searches different SE's in different languages, filters the results and ranks them according to the number of engines that finds a page and the weight they give to the the different engines.

I think Hitman has a point here. Perhaps we should be paying attention the the European meta engines, even if we cannot submit to them directly. Any thoughts on this anyone?

[heini]

Hitman is of course right when stating meta engines use their own algos.
I have recently toyed around with metager [meta.rrzn.uni-hannover.de], the most important German meta. Gives me 2 times more traffic than web.de, which is one of the biggest portals/directories with Fast powered search.
Metager is fun, can only recommend playing around with it. They have for example a preview feature thatīs most useful and completely free of cache problems. They use a lynx derivative to give the user a text only view of the page in an extra window. Nice and handy.

But back to the point:
Metager uses most of the german SEs. I canīt really see any preferences here. It seems to be important to be in as much of them as possible, Their preset time for SEs to answer a request is 10 seconds, lets fall AV.de from the shelf quite often.
I had read that emphasis was put on meta tags, but could not verify. Had a #1 position there from a board post, that came without the query in the metas and title.
A rather high density seemed to work well, but in their own info on metager ranking they state that KW spamming will be recognised.
Also they say algo gets changed ever so often, which might be true, since itīs a university related project.
So bottomline is: stay on top of german SEs, do basic SEO, and you will have reasonable success with them. But I see no way to do special optimisation for them.
Of course Iīm open to tips and insights....

[Hitman]

I think we should pay attention to the meta search engines for 3 reasons:

1)

Rencke:
Perhaps we should be paying attention the the European meta engines, even if we cannot submit to them directly.

That is not always true. Mamma, for example, has it own (paid) inclusion service:

[mamma.whatuseek.com...]

2)

Heini:
So bottomline is: stay on top of german SEs, do basic SEO, and you will have reasonable success with them. But I see no way to do special optimisation for them (the meta engines, HM).

I agree with Heini that as far as I can see you cannot optimize for the meta engines directly. (Does anyone know better?)

But: You should know which engines they use and how these effect the rankings. This way you can improve your rankings in the meta's.

Example: until a few days ago I never bothered about Kanoodle. But suddenly I found one of my sites listed in Mamma (which is a big meta) because it was found by Kanoodle. And Mamma doesn't even mention Kanoodle in the supported engines list!

Knowing this, you can start submitting pages to Kanoodle or even optimize for it (or any other SE you found in this manner) and thus improve your rankings in Mamma. BTW: Kanoodle works with bids on keywords and I have no idea where this listing came from :(

3) The meta engines are also important to SEO companies for another reasen: your clients use them and like to see them in your reports :)

[carlwright]

>> 3) The meta engines are also important to SEO companies for another reasen: your clients use them and like to see them in your reports <<

A good portion of the queries appearing to run through us are SEOs and clients checking their own sites position in the main search engines.

[Rumbas]

Heini:
>I have recently toyed around with metager, the most important German meta. Gives me 2 times more traffic than web.de

I'm extremly happy with Metager! A while back we didn't pay much attention to it but as rankings increased on the other german se's, we started to see a nice flow of traffic from them. I didn't "catch" them as an important german SE before getting good placements all over the board. Figured it must have been a Meta search engine.
Well, you could have figured that out by the name; metager ;)

I didn't notice it because the referrals where from [meta.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]

Could you maybe tell us the list of domains that point to them?

On top of my head:

[metager.de...]
[meta.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]
[bserv.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]
[jserv.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]
[mserv.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]

Being as large a german search referral as it is, maybe it ought to be listed here in the German SE's section [webmasterworld.com]

[heini]

Hej Rumbas

Wonder where you got that
bserv.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/ from, never seen it....
Anyway, there are some more related adresses
[metager.de...]
[www-cache.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]
[rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]
[rvs.uni-hannover.de...]
[java.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]
[harvest.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]
Also they cooperate on a human guided search portal:
[metaportal.at...]

In my logs anyhow they show as
[mserv.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]
[meta.rrzn.uni-hannover.de...]

Hitman, I see your point. It might be useful to set up a list of the more important european metas with the SEs they use.
Itīs all a bit vague though, since the metas I have used usually let the user decide which SEs are queried.
Still, I will prepare stuff for the german metas, could post it then...
Rencke, what do you think?

[rencke]

>Rencke, what do you think?

Me thinks Hitman has presented a very convincing case when he wrote this: "The meta engines are also important to SEO companies for another reason: your clients use them and like to see them in your reports".

So, let's collect data on European meta engines. Question: What data would be relevant here?

[Rumbas]

Tjüss Heini ;)

Yum yum. Thank you very much. Now I just have to update the Webtrends keywords file, and voiá more credit to me SEO wise.

I love documetation, and making an overview of Eurooean Meta engines would be great

>What data would be relevant here?

I think which SE's are supported including any PPC infulence, their country of origin and place on the map in terms of market share/searches.

[heini]

>What data would be relevant here?

Suggestions:

- available language interfaces
- Which SEs are queried by default
- ranking: preferred SE, position
per SE, further insights (?)
- info on usage

agreed, the last two points might be a bit difficult. Could be question-marked in beginning, waiting for info to eventually be brought up?