German speaking SE underdogs

se in german other than the usual lot

[spaidermen]

Hello,

i am targeting german-speaking countries with a seo campaign.
I will submit to google, fast, inktomi, altavista.
I need to submit to residual indexes.
So far I know Tricus, Yoodle, Search.ch
I don't know if Fastbot.de powers big or medium players.
I also need to submit to local directories such as Web.de
Please add other players if any.

[spaidermen]

Also, I'd like to know what are the major players powered by Google beyond T-online, Yahoo, Aol and Web.de

[Receptional]

fireball.de

Dixon.

[stever]

Try here (although it's old):

[webmasterworld.com...]

and (slightly less old):

[webmasterworld.com...]

[spaidermen]

Thank you. You mean Fireball uses Google too?
Those topics are way too old, 2 years in internet equals two centuries in real world!

[takagi]

European Search Engine Chart [webmasterworld.com] is more up-to-date.

[heini]

There is no residual engines worth mentioning, sorry, but that's how it is.
Basically you have Google with a marketshare of anything upwards of 85% (and growing).
Since they lost T-Online there is only very small traffic from the ATW index anymore. They have Lycos...

Fireball still maintains their own engine - traffic is in the <1% range.

You'll want to get into msn.de, currently via Looksmart, but not for long.

[spaidermen]

Thank you Heini, are you referring to swiss and austrian traffic as well?
Indeed I am proposing two solutions to my customer, one covering 85% with google and google-powered sites, the other with 100% or so with the residual.
I can tell that such 15% is covered by Msn (Inktomi?), Lycos, Fireball, Web.de, Tricus, Yoodle, Search.ch

[Sinner_G]

I posted my stats for a site in Switerland here [webmasterworld.com].

[spaidermen]

Thank you sinner, that figure is referring to Msn.com?

[Sinner_G]

referring to Msn.com?

No, it's for all MSN domains. msn.ch accounts for more than 80% of the figure, msn.com makes it to around 5-6% of it, the rest being maily from msn.fr and msn.de.

[spaidermen]

OK so in Switzerland Google is much less monopolist.
Msn.ch is powered by inktomi, right?

[takagi]

OK so in Switzerland Google is much less monopolist.

That is hard to say, with statistics of only one site. It could be that this site is doing much better in the SERPs of MSN than the SERPs of Google.

[spaidermen]

You're right, I know it's only one site yet so far is the only data we have! So as far as we know Google is at 60-65% for switzerland...

[Fischerlaender]

SEO in Germany is just only GO - Google optimizing.

The counter service Webhits [webhits.de] gives you some idea of the current traffic scheme in Germany.

Google 72.2%
Yahoo 6.8%
MSN 5.9%
T-Online 2.5%
AOL 2.3%
Lycos 1.7%
(Alltheweb)
Altavista 1.6%
Web.de 1.1%
(Directory, Google)
Metager 1.0%
(Metaengine: Alltheweb via Lycos, Google via Fastbot)
Fireball 1.0%

Any other search engine has less than 1% - and there are plenty of them. My advice: Tell your client that Google alone is 85%, and that optimizing for Google usually results in good positions on the other engines.

I don't know if Fastbot.de powers big or medium players.

Fastbot is powered by Google - and sometimes by Altavista. They pretend to be a search engine on their own, but in reality they are a just a "meta search engine" which only queries Google ...

[spaidermen]

Allright!
So far we have:

Germany: Google 85%, Msn 5%, others 10%

Switzerland: Google 60-65%, Msn 20-25%, Search.ch 5%, others 5-15%

Austria: No data yet

[stever]

Austria (specialist area, multi-language sites):

Google: 70-90%
Yahoo: 3-8%
MSN: 1-7%
AV: 1-4%
ATW: 1-3%

Fireball, Web.de, T-Online virtually nothing (NB no pfi or ppc on these sites).

[spaidermen]

Brilliant!
Now we have:

Germany (wide sample)
Google powered 85%, Msn 5%, others 10%

Switzerland (one-site sample)
Google powered 60-65%, Msn 20-25%, Search.ch 5%, others 5-15%

Austria (one-site sample)
Google powered 80%, Msn 5%, others 15%

[Sinner_G]

Switzerland (one-site sample)
Google powered 60-65%, Msn 20-25%, Search.ch 5%, others 5-15%

One-site and that site is changing too. The above stats referred to the months of July-August. September shows a much higher Google level, mostly on cost of MSN. Trend is confirmed by this months stats until now (even more Google). So stats for September:

Google ~ 75%
MSN ~ 11%
search.ch ~ 3.5%
Yahoo ~ 2.5%
Bluewin ~ 1.5%
Altavista ~ 0.5%

What does that mean? I don't have a clue, as I don't have the stats for those months last year. Maybe it has something to do with summer holidays (office users more Google, home users more MSN?). I haven't noticed much difference in the SERPs and place is about the same on the different engines.

[stever]

And note the various caveats on the Austrian "sites" I mentioned (not just one site).

[spaidermen]

Msn gets traffic by being the default page for many users, but also it usually does a lot of self-promotion with contests, special features, etc, perhaps in the previous month it attracted more ttraffic. Google has a more stable stream of users

[spaidermen]

I'd like to see a list of 4-5 German-speaking portals powered by google, even if they bring a minor share of traffic

[Sinner_G]

Have not tested them lately, but IIRC, these use Google for primary results:

Web.de
Stern.de
t-online.de

and of course the local version of:

AOL.de
Yahoo.de

[spaidermen]

Thank you. Any idea of the traffic search of these? Yahoo.de is around 2,5% according to some posts here

[Sinner_G]

Can only tell you the approximate percentage of SE referral for them on a swiss site (same as above):

web.de: 0.25%
stern.de: 0
t-online.de: 0.45%
aol.de: 0.01%
yahoo.de: 1%

and the local google version google.de: 25%

[heini]

This month I have AOL and Yahoo anywhere between 2-5% each. T-online has fallen off to 1-2%. Web.de is way below the 1% mark. So that's your underdogs :)

The only non Google traffic even worth considering is MSN, currently around 4% for me.

So speaking about SE driven traffic it's more than 90% Google.

[Sheep]

@Fischerlaender

As far as I know you´re not right about fastbot. fastbot has its own independet index and its own crawler:

[google.de...]

Also they power the german meta search metager and it would be quite illegitimate to power a meta search by a meta search.

[sem4u]

What I want to know is why Google is just so popular in Germany.

[Sinner_G]

sem4u, I don't think Google is more popular in Germany than in any other country. If you take the sites into account for which Google provides search results (e.g. AOL, Yahoo,...), you will get 80% and more wherever you are.

[spaidermen]

That's not true. My estimate for Italy sees Google-powered traffic amounting to only 60%, much less than in Germany.
See this topic: [webmasterworld.com...]

Generally speaking, Google share depends on how many big players in a given country are using it. So, altough Google share can be similar everywhere (in Europe at least), the overall share of Google-powered sites vary a lot.
Taking again Italy as an example, only one of the two major portals is google-powered for default searching (that's Virgilio). The other, Libero, is powered by Arianna.