se "partners"

help me make sense of this!

[maques]

this may have been covered before but i can't seem to find a clear-cut answer (so please excuse me if this is redundant):

a lot (or at least some) of these se's seem to feed the same "partners" so if you pay to be included in a couple of them (pay-for-inclusion or ppc) you potentially have overlapping suppliers of your website - does that make any sense?

anyway, the question is this. is it worth it? or will i be competing with myself? say someone searches for my keyword on excite and it pulls my listing from 2 different se's, will one listing preclude the other? or will both show up?

ps- my terminology may be all wrong so please bear with me.

thanks.

- max

[jdMorgan]

maques,

Here's the WebmasterWorld Search Engine Relationship Chart [webmasterworld.com], and here's another Search Engine Relationship Chart [bruceclay.com] from Bruce Clay (pdf format).

To answer your question, yes, you could end up paying for two different inclusion programs, both of which are used by some search services. In this case, you might only get one listing out out the deal. By tracking which ones overlap, and which search services your target market actually use, you may be able to minimize your investment. In other cases, it might be worthwhile to get wider coverage, even though there is some overlap.

HTH,
Jim

[maques]

jim,

thanks for the chart link - i saw it once before and then of course could no longer find it! lol

and thanks for the advice. my situation is that i actually don't fret too much about shelling out a few more bucks (especially if it's ppc) but i AM concerned about doing more damage than good. i'm already with overture, google adwords, inktomi, ah-ha, and looksmart. i was thinking of signing up for findwhat and maybe fast (this one appears to have A LOT of common ground with inktomi) but as i said, i might be shooting myself in the foot. is this a legitimate concern? or is this overlapping/competing-with-my-own-listings issue so minor that it's not really an issue?

thanks again.

- max

[jdMorgan]

Aside from speding extra money, I don't think there's any "damage" to be done with multiple "pay services." One thing you should be aware of though is that Overture is buying AllTheWeb from Fast, and Yahoo is buying Inktomi. So that might affect your plans.

Jim