Yahoo Search and Overture SiteMatch In Relation to European Scene

impacts on german search engines

[Bernie]

While a hot discussion about yahoo's sitematch pfi-program is going on in the supporters forum I was just wondering if it even effects SEMs mainly operating in Germany. I would like to collect some information and opinions about it's impact on the german market. IMO the impact will be rather low. In fact I did pretty well skipping most of the second tier engines in the last years.

So after "Google-Mama" we have:

Yahoo.de
MSN.de
T-Online.de
AOL.de
Web.de
Altavista.de
Lycos.de

Yahoo and MSN have a market share of around 5-6%, T-Online around 2-3% the Rest is < 2%.

The biggest or maybe the only noticeable impact will come from yahoo.de changing from google to yahoo-results.

Having a closer look on the MSN-results we have:

1. Selected websites 1x (from big content or advert.-partners)
2. Sponsored results 3x (Overture)
3. Websites from the MSN/Allesklar directory (rest of the serp)
4. for every new page 3x sponsored results (Overture)
and the rest directory-sites
5. then after a long time (10-15th result page) search engine results that should be served from yahoo.

-> I seriously doubt that anybody get's more than one referrer a month from the search engine results in MSN.de :-)

-> Only question is: Does MSN.de have any motivation to skip the directory sites listing? Looking at the market situation with the competitors Google, Yahoo and Microsoft it doesn't seem likely.

T-Online
Has been delivering ATW results after PPC-results from Google. Now they are simply delivering organic results from Google after 5 Adwords-Results. Consequent and understandable since they consider Yahoo as their direct competitor.

-> No impact here.

AOL.de

1. Recommended websites 2x
2. Sponsored Links 3X (Overture)
3. Google

-> No impact here.

Web.de
1. Sponsored Links 3x (Espotting)
2. Own directory results

-> No impact here.

Altavista.de
1. Sponsored Links 4x (Overture)
2. Results from Yahoo search (they already updated their TOS)

-> Impact

Lycos.de
1. Sponsored Links 2x (Overture)
2. Search results should switch to Yahoo (still seeing fast results)

-> Impact

All in all we are talking about 7-8% market share.

[HitProf]

Very good observation Bernie. I agree that the impact will be limited. Even less if you do well in the new Yahoo: who cares if the listing comes from Google or Yahoo, if the url (or another url from the same site) is still listed. OK, positions may differ and one url converts better than another, but the algo's are not that much different as far as I can tell and many top 100 sites in G are top 100 in Y as well.

In countries where Yahoo! doesn't have it's own portal the impact may even be less.

[Bernie]

agreed HitProf.

there is something suspicous about msn.de going on:

check the link "website hinzufügen" on top right = add your site. you are being redirected directly to overture.

does this mean msn.de organic results are no longer based on the directory allesklar.de?

*confused*

[heini]

Bernie, Allesklar has lost MSN many months ago. MSN then switched to Looksmart - which I'd expect to end soon.
As to the effect of Yahoo - this will unfortunately not change all that much for us. The marketshare is not there, and I don't see how they will get it.

[Bernie]

uups, you mean msn.de? How is that I don't see any german entries in looksmart...