Lycos dying?

Got a few damn good listings but no traffic

[satanclaus]

Is the Lycos engine just steadily tapering off? I have top 10 listings for a few keyword combinations that return astonishing amounts of traffic on Google or Yahoo. But on Lycos its hardly a thing. I know they're not in the same league as Google or Yahoo but man I expected better.

Anyone have any links to articles related to data on Lycos performance as of lately?

thanks

[Eric_Jarvis]

all I can say is that we get traffic from the various national lycoses, but damn all from the .com

[FreeBee]

Ditto Eric, in our case something like 3 times the traffic from uk versus .com despite the fact that we target the US market more aggressively and have spent a lot more effort on placement in the .com database in the past. (Admittedly some recent UK directory listings have helped a hugely.)

I suspect the difference in regional performance could relate to a more dramatically weakening position by Lycos in the US?

[toolman]

Lycos/Fast is a waste of time in the US.

[lawman]

A couple months ago I was placed very well on Lycos. Lycos amounted to only 1.11% of the referring domains that my stats server could track.

I could not track any actual business coming from Lycos (I do that through online and telephone intakes). Since the last update, I am not as well placed, but I'm not in a big hurry to resubmit.

Lawman

[Brad]

I think they have traffic, but I think there is so much garbage, much of it paid, on the search results pages that surfers never see the top stuff.

I'd also love to see the demographics of Lycos searchers -- is it used as a serious business tool or is it entertainment oriented or what?

[rcjordan]

Definitely 4th-tier, but worthwhile for me. Like Excite (and NBCi before they killed it), traffic may depend on demographics. Here's the last 15 months of a US .com page with a travel focus, about 600k uniques. It has "most popular" position on several Lycos SERPs.

Excite 9.20%

Altavista 5.54%

Goto.com 4.91%

Lycos 3.91%

Dogpile 3.19%

Looksmart 3.06%

HotBot 2.46%

Askjeeves 1.74%

[satanclaus]

I can tell you that Lycos traffic is not oriented around entertainment as that is the target area of the sites which brought me to start this thread.

For example: I have a site on the 1st page of Lycos and near the top of the search for "Pamela Anderson". It has a great description and gets a whopping 100 hits a day! Similar entertainment based listings don't do any better. I just thought Lycos would be good for something after that big "Anna Kournikova" advertising campaign they went on not too long ago.