Why so little traffic from Fast?

[tedster]

With the obvious technical brilliance of AllTheWeb, and SERPs that are astute enough to put many of my client sites on the first page ;) why would a site get so very little traffic from AllTheWeb and Lycos? Is their technical brilliance married to a lack of marketing and PR savvy?

I'm really stumped here. The lack of traffic means I don't pay them much attention, even though I appreciate them.

When I do check out how a site is doing on Fast, I don't usually find big problems with ranking. So how can it be that a number one, on a rather competitive SINGLE keyword, only brings in a dribble of traffic? For instance, 1% - 2% of the total in one case.

I really don't get it!

[jimmykav]

I too have wondered about this lack of referals from the FAST engine.
I get a dribble of users who come from Lycos and it uses the FAST engine.
Is the FAST site well known to ordinary surfers outside of webmasters?
I have taken a quick straw poll of friends here (ordinary surfers) and they had not heard of alltheweb.com.
It is a great engine, but in my case, it does not seem to genereate the traffic one would expect. My ranking is reasonable but it seems that the kind of people who would be interested in my site just dont use fast.....

[Rumbas]

I guess it has something to do with Alltheweb.com only being a showcase/window for FAST's technology. It's like inktomi.com not being a search engine per se.
FAST have not done any serious marketing for Alltheweb and not that many people know it actualy excists.

Personally I love FAST due to the large numbers of European partners - specially in Germany with T-online and Lycos.de and it is from the partner sites that we receive the traffic. Lycos.com has never flooded me with traffic either.

[heini]

Alltheweb doesnīt generate much traffic - itīs a showcase for Fast, even says so somewhere on their site.
The Fast outlets for me amount to some remarkable traffic. Lycos.Europe has tremendous reach in Europe. It is however a real portal, websearch is, like free e-mail service, just a means to get people to their site. Nevertheless Lycos.de brings about 5-10% for me. Combined with t-onlne and Web.de itīs fairly over 15%.
With Lycos.com Iīm wondering if the new pure Fast ranking displayed since beginning of November shouldnīt improve traffic. Anybody have an idea on the demographics of Lycos.com? Is it rather the AOL type of user or the Google type?

[caine]

Fast does generate traffic for my site's from the northern european countries, and i have noticed a significant increase since the rank jumped from the lower 5-10 rank for kw's, upto, mostly 1 and 2's through to five, for less targetted kw's.

It's possible, it is an engine for people more computer literate, i.e. know most of the SE's, but through lycos, i see good traffic from customers / potential customer base that spans all literacy off the computer world.

[IanTurner]

UK Lycos is very good for me, Lycos have done a big PR campaign in the UK and have a good user base.

with sites having little PR budget Lycos/Fast is second to Google, even for those where the PR budget is better I still find that a good Lycos ranking puts Lycos at number 3 or 4 in my stats.

One site even has Lycos far outstripping all others, but this is because of one rather daft ranking.

A good Lycos ranking will bring in between 10 and 25 percent of Google traffic for .co.uk sites.

[tedster]

So I guess one issue is that my sites are all obviously US based. That would explain low conversion, but not low referals. I'm going to be paying more attention to Fast.

Too high a precentage of Google traffic is not a balanced situation, and that's what several of my clients are looking at, especially the ones who won't pay for directories and Ink spidering.

[seoboy]

tedster -

i have to agree with you on questioning the US lycos traffic issue. we also get very little traffic from them (relative to rankings). i'd expect more.

i suppose US lycos gets less traffic than we might think? i always thought it was stronger on the east coast, but perhaps that foothold has weakened with google's growth?

i guess the bottom line is that terra lycos is focusing on being a dominant european portal, not a dominant US portal... from what others here say, they seem to be doing a fine job overseas, too...

seoboy

[IanTurner]

Your probably right - we get almost no traffic from Excite, it is almost non existent in UK version.

Different market - different engines to target.

[heini]

Perhaps itīs not so much a question of Lycos` reach, but rather how often Lycos users search the web?

Lycos, at least in Europe, very much goes for portalization. Entertainment, shopping and service channels is what Lycos and their content partners, namely Bertelsmann are concentrating on. Luckily - for us - they decided a good websearch would compliment their offerings, a websearch that is fast, fresh, and can be utilized for paid services and ad placements.

In Europe I see a clear tendency for seperating between entertainment portals and informational websearch. In other words: Lycos/AOL etc vs Google.

Thatīs why I keep thinking itīs a mistake from Fast not to try and push alltheweb into competing with Google.

[Marcia]

>Lycos have done a big PR campaign in the UK

I've heard a couple of Lycos ads on the radio recently here in Los Angeles, but I don't know if those were hitting the right audience. I'd imagine they checked the demographics in advance.

>push alltheweb into competing with Google

Google's weighing so heavily in the balance of power, imo some competition would be healthy. It would be nice if a couple of US-based ISPs would start using FAST.

To me, FAST spells quality, both for searches and for attitude. Like what we see right here [webmasterworld.com].

[heini]

>would be nice if a couple of US-based ISPs would start using FAST.

Fast is heading towards the largest index worldwide, 2 Billion pages. This alone will make some ISPīs consider using them.

But what about Alltheweb.com as searchdestination in itīs own right? We see a steadily growing number of users preferring the uncluttered, informational search that Google provides. Without any visible effort Googleīs market share in pure websearch is becoming absolutely dominant.

So why should Alltheweb not be able to challenge Google in this market?

[IanTurner]

Even with FASTs technology they still seem more vulnerable to spamming than Google.