The New Excite

[Brett_Tabke]

We've not noticed any major improvement or hit since Excite 'relaunched' with the new look and results. It is the same old story: older sites are doing well, but newer sites are finding it difficult to get listed. We've had Excite visit a few new sites, but they aren't showing up in the DB there or at WebCrawler.

[seoboy]

brett,

first off, compliments on the new forum. i'm a longtime lurker at SEF, but willing to jump into the chat here based on the quality of the discussion that i've seen...

soooooooooo, to the issue at hand: its true that new pages arent getting in at excite (pretty much nothing submitted since November, by my count) but what's really interesting to me is the new algo.

there's definitely been a shakeup in results, not just look and feel of the engine. appears that top results are leaning in the link pop direction - though its hard to say... excite *has* been tracking clicks for about a year now...

course, you'd figure that - if they were tracking clicks - there'd be a better chance that sites stuck at the top for the past year would also be at the top for "most popular"... and sadly, after the shakeup my listings that were blanketing some top searches are now scattered to the wind.... :P

i'd just about cashed in the chips on excite, but all these changes make it hard for me to believe that they're going to roll over and die...

...does anyone else smell a big spidering coming?

gotta start testing this new algo before it hits all the new sites sitting in line to be visited.

seoboy

[Brett_Tabke]

I just walked through our logs and we are getting routinely spidered in the normal Excite fashion. After back tracking the hand full of referrals, I was kind of stunned to find dozens of top page results on semi decent keywords. They just aren't generating like they used too.

[seoboy]

...definitely not generating like the AOL glory days.

which begs the question - will excite traffic EVER pick up and be "worth it" vs. energy that could be put toward other engines?

oh,and i wasnt implying that the spidering is happening NOW, just that i'm sorta expecting one in the next 2 months, say...

can't imagine they'd put all that work in and still keep new sites out...

my old sites are being spidered -business as usual- too. but the newer sites have never heard of excite.

Edited by: seoboy

[littleman]

I dunno seoboy, it could be that excite is just going to stay in bed with looksmart to keep afloat. Read this:
[news.cnet.com...]
AT&T is using the excite brand for all it is worth, but I don't believe the excite spider is going to be a priority. My
prediction is that excite will become a shell the way lycos is now.

[Brett_Tabke]

I agree Littleman. Or, they may end up just dumping excite and keeping @home. It was really the broad band they wanted in the first place. I think this Google Yahoo deal will have more ramifications than first appears. We could see Excite back on netscape.

[seoboy]

brett,

what's your thinking here? that AOL would want to differentiate itself from Yahoo? if so, why would AOL have been pushing Ink results this whole time?

in the big picture Excite@Home and AOL are bigger direct competitors than AOL and Yahoo - at least for now (i'm figuring in the subscriber-based model for each)... isnt that really why AOL/Netscape dumped the Excite engine in the first place?

i remember that being my take back when AOL switched to Ink - if you'll remember it happened as soon as they could ditch their Excite contract, and pretty soon after the @Home Excite merger...

seoboy

[Brett_Tabke]

Netscape and Yahoo are not what you'd call best buds anymore. Yahoo has been making their own way lately and that hasn't included any support for Netscape. AOL - yes, direct competitors with Yahoo. I think anything AOL can do to take Yahoo down a notch they will. Seeing Google results on Yahoo can't set will with Netscape/AOL.