NBCi went to GoTo, looks like their traffic went to Google

[rcjordan]

The regulars here know that I had one large site with fairly significant (high converting) traffic from NBCi. This is a very stable site and, with the exception of NBCi which approved deep-linking, depends entirely upon spidering engines. I do not submit pages from this site to any of the SEs, so there are no spikes based on making it into a new engine. Growth in traffic is steady, as are its traffic patterns on a weekly basis. In short, it makes a good guage for comparisons.

I've been watching it nervously (it makes $$) as NBCi collapsed. In January of this year, I'd estimate that perhaps as much as 40% of the traffic came from the LiveDirectory. Traffic dropped noticeably when NBCi closed their search box affiliate program in March and continued to trend down until reaching about 10% of site traffic in May. I assume they declined due to the lack of promotion in other media and perhaps decreased emphasis on their co-branded pages at major ISPs. Google and MSN picked up the traffic during this period and total pageviews returned to normal.

On July 1, NBCi flipped the switch and started showing straight GoTo. Since I do not bid GoTo on these 4,000 terms, the traffic dip was sharp and immediate -10%. But it also started to rebound, primarily via Google. Yesterday's stats look normal when compared to the two previous Thursdays. Today looks like it's may be trending up over the usual Friday. Interestingly, both Altavista and Excite have started showing up in the referrals more frequently over the last week.

Here at WebmasterWorld, we've been wondering if JohnQ would recognize paid placement SERPs and migrate away from them. This is far from the definitive example, particularly since I do not have GoTo traffic to compare if they gained what the LiveDirectory lost. Still...

[engine]

Fascinating - real world examples of the results of search services tinkering with PPC.

This could indicate that a PPC model will not achieve anything like the results of a quality, freely positioned information, such as from Google.

[Napoleon]

As a self proclaimed enemy of PPC, this is of course music to my ears.

However, the evidence is mounting. Joe Public wants relevancy, NOT biggest bid wins. Joe Public is not as stupid as some people assume.

The AV decline accelerated when GoTo came on board. Others have also experienced the same effect. Now we have NBCi.

The sign of an SE in decline is rapidly becoming the introduction of PPC... GoTo in particular. In NBCi's case, it is a sort of 'grab some cash before we die' death knell.

Despite the oncoming tide, maybe the future of traditional SEO isn't so bleak after all.