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SearchMole.co.uk

are they new?

         

caine

11:37 am on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Trying to figure out where it gets its feed from?

any idea's

IanTurner

12:16 pm on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



They've not been around long, a couple of months or so, they are owned by the same people who own search demon.

It looks to me like its ESpotting with Inktomi backfill.

JoeyJoeJoe

1:11 pm on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



And they are using thousands of subdomains to encourage Google to spider more pages, and faster. Not a bad idea, but I think that this is just labelling the site as built from the ground up to fill Google's listings.

I am amazed that Espotting is encouraging/allowing this kind of work. It is one thing to set up a "search engine" site and get SEO traffic as one form of promotion, it is entirely different to build it just for SEO traffic.

And isn't this just going to be competing with Search Demon, Holiday Demon and Finance Demon in the listings?

caine

1:43 pm on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Thats how i picked them up, very bizarre how they choice a subdomain that would fire them up in G! as the term i was looking for is incrediably specialised.

JoeyJoeJoe

2:02 pm on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Looks like they managed to get 58,000 pages into Google all at once. Expect to see them everywhere. How much longer is Google going to put up with Espotting affiliates spamming on this kind of scale?

steve40

2:08 pm on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



searchmole and multiple others,
currently there about 20 plus of these type of sites taking results from espotting, overture, mirago, alltheweb with over 1 million pages in the google index ,
most owned by 3 companies
are they uk directories no not sure how they should be described
are the results usefull in google yes kind of top results of pages are to earn rest are usefull to the searcher

they all do quite well ( check alexa for them traffic is quite high )
many have over 50,000 pages in the index
the problem is as more and more come on stream suspect google will squash them all which would be a shame

JoeyJoeJoe

4:49 pm on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Exactly. One or two might be useful as alternatives, especially given the current slipping in Google SERP quality, but we don't need multiple sites listing the same results over and over again. I wouldn't have a problem with one Espotting affiliate in the top ten for any search (it has to be better than Ebay, Kelkoo and Amazon!), but we don't need more than one. Search Demon is big enough on its own, without the same people making more pages to target the same searches.

Either Espotting needs to stop this, or Google should drop one of them to send a clear message.

exmoorbeast

5:29 pm on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Agree Steve. If the site's results are relevant to what the surfer has looked for then the site has served it's purpose. If not then it has failed the user and the user will go elsewhere and possibly not come back.

IHMO, it's all about the engine sussing out people's surfing habbits and being able to deliver results in a timely manner and on a consistent basis. There is nothing worse that going to an engine and finding it broken, slow and out of date. Most of the sites that do well these days address those very issues.

There seems to be quite a few sites out there that partner with companies that privide search feed. Sites like shopping.net, Searchdemon.co.uk, Toxiclemon.co.uk onebigworld.co.uk and redhotchilli.co.uk etc all use a combination of different providers. As far as I'm concerned, these are all UK sites which can only be a good thing for the Internet industry here, and we should be encouraging them by listing our sites there. It's only a matter of time before these sites start developing their own bots (like Mirago have done) and that's exactly how innovative companies grow and develop. After all Yahoo has been growing on the back of Google for the last couple of years and the same is true with MSN and Inktomi.

steve40

5:44 pm on Nov 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



hi exmoor,
yes in some ways they are good news for small uk websites as they feed traffic back to the smaller sites , the problem will be when the first 2 pages of uk serps are dominated by these type sites as i am sure many many more will appear and abuse appears i.e. list sites but when poor searcher clicks what he thinks is freds widget shop goes off to some other site that is affiliate programme or ppc link i have seen one already doing this
also as more get in on the bandwagen will kill for all,
i watched the first 3 come on line and thought was a good idea unsure if the sites should have called themselves directories but thats just being pedantic
steve

chrisuk

10:07 am on Jan 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



How are they doing the subdomain trick? Mod-rewrite? or some kind of alias system.

I can't see some poor guy creating all those subdomains by hand but maybe there is a small army doing it?

ncw164x

3:45 pm on Jan 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>>and we should be encouraging them by listing our sites there

But all these sites have one thing in common and that is search results by espotting, I do not want to list my sites on espotting and have the money clicked away by this network of sites which have been manufactured for the sole purpose of sucking money from advertisers pockets.

That is the bottom line in the construction of these sites, there's one on a UK search list which has that many domain names pointing to the index page I bet Nominet has trouble keeping up with the domain name registrations.

You do a search at google for a phrase which has nothing to do with the search result and bingo up pops a serp which redirects you to, Yes you guessed it, another espotting search results site.

And your trying to tell me this is the way forward, I don't think so.

It was only over the Christmas holidays that TL was removed from google, or so called removed who knows, but all of the pages disappeared and then returned, if google are on to this problem of espotting search result sites dominating serps they would of been removed totally by now but alas they are still there

ncw164x

Bobby_Davro

4:39 pm on Jan 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



TL doesn't show many Espotting results - it is a meta search of commercial and non-commercial results (5 com, 5 noncom), including Fast, Teoma, Inktomi, Google and Mirago. Most of the advertising is through Adwords and Overture.

This is very different to ten straight Espotting adverts.

steve40

5:16 pm on Jan 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Well Well interesting that over the xmas break 2 more sites using same format appeared in google with 60,000 + pages indexed , so maybe big G should order more hardware currently between 30 sites in this style 2.1 million pages indexed if it keeps going might even get to 5 mill pages between them in next month with more sites
the shame is the first site that did this was a good idea now I think it's getting out of hand
would be interesting to find out what GG thinks as it's tempting way to gain major traffic, did some checking takes short time to create pages using popular search results
One further thing suspect they may kill the goose that lays the golden egg as more and more are now number 1 in serps for thousands of queries so will be seen by google who may squash the lot
steve

LittleFrodo

5:57 pm on Jan 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



The actions ofsearchmole and sapivi (and presumable some more fairly soon) will start to effect affiliate sites that do not arrive SO quickly within google - I say Google should not allow more than about 500 pages of content from a site to appear at any one time anyway?

[edited by: IanTurner at 10:00 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2004]
[edit reason] see sticky mail [/edit]

TinkyWinky

9:33 am on Jan 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



LiitleFrodo,

I take it from the edit that you may have opverstepped the mark or said something a little to close to the bone - don't worry it happens to the best of us - I should know ;)

Good point about the maximum number of pages at any one time being entered - I would have thought this is the easiest way to stop the proliferation of sites within the Google SERPS. What do you think GG?

I also do not have a problem with Google and other search engines ensuring that there are no more than 25,000 pages from any one site - sub-domains included. This would ensure that affiliates can still earn well (as often they do provide a good service and some accurate results) but no one party can dominate the rankings.

In total, worldwide, there can only be a handful of sites that have more than about 20,000 pages that are truely unique e.g. BBC, CNN, Discover channel etc - and Google could simply implement a flag system that once a certain number of pages are listed within their SERPS - they hand-review the site to check whether they should allow any more.

This would certainly curb the actions of some and in one foul swoop make the SERPS a little more open to geniune sites.

IanTurner

2:06 pm on Jan 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



This discussion is drifting off its original topic, so we'll conclude here.