Yahoo and Kelkoo

[lloyd]

So Yahoo have now bought Kelkoo for EU475m.

It is Big Dog eat little dog time again.

Is the Internet going to be run by 3 companies by the end of the year, if it isn't already.

The Google v Yahoo v MSN war is truely on.

[sem4u]

Ask Jeeves are still hanging in there...but most of their revenues come from Google!

[Bobby_Davro]

I think that we might well be seeing a Kelkoo switch to Overture in the very near future then, lol.

Large amounts of the Kelkoo traffic come from their 300,000+ pages in the Google index, which is strong SEO by anyone's reckoning. Many of the pages that they have in the Google index are for products that they don't even have on Kelkoo. I would expect a major clearout of these pages by Google very soon.

Interestingly, last time I checked Kelkoo, there were over 700,000 pages in Google, so this has more than halved in the last month. I wonder whether Google anticipated the buyout and began the downgrading? OR this could be a side effect of the March spam cull.

[lloyd]

Bobby, surely you are not saying that Kelkoo get or got preferential treatment in general rankings.

Are you saying that you can increase your rankings on Google, if you have a special relationship with them.

[edited by: engine at 4:01 pm (utc) on Mar. 26, 2004]

[Bobby_Davro]

I am not saying anything. All I know is that Kelkoo was one of the most ostentatiously heavy SEO sites on the web (I am being very careful with my words here!), and happened to be a Google partner. They had 730,000 pages in Google at one point not so long ago. Now they have a lot less. Could be coincidence.

Am I saying that all partners get preferential treatment? From my own direct experience, I would very clearly say no. I do imagine, however, that corporate negotiations have some sway; Google can't be completely deaf to commercial partnerships and concerns.

[exmoorbeast]

There is no doubt in my mind that Kelkoo got indexing help from Google. It was in Google's interests once the Google feed was implemented. Kelkoo's index count went through the roof, and conversly they slowed their spend on adwords and shifted that cost to their affiliates, while getting free traffic from Google. A clever move all round, and every body won in the end. Apart from Google in 6 months time that is :-)

[chrisuk]

Lots of sites are well indexed in google, is 300k+ pages that unusual. I heard something about ebay pursuing a seo route also to get their dynamic pages indexed better.

[Bobby_Davro]

300K is a LOT of pages, and it was at a high of 700K. There can only be a few thousand sites on the web with that many pages indexed.

I see 441,000 in Google at the moment for .com and 1,020,000 pages for .co.uk. That's 1 million pages from the UK site. Perhaps they aren't being penalised by Google at all. I would question whether Kelkoo have 1 million unique products in their database.

[Legin]

It seems to me that they have been very clever.

There are not that many pages in kelkoo however they have managed to get hundreds of thousands of possible kelkoo search result pages listed. This way they may only have 50,000 or less pages on the site but the amount of possible search and results is massive.

[netnerd]

SO - how much does it cost to advertise on Kelkoo?

Is it PPC?

[Legin]

Last time I checked it was about 30p per click but the more you pay the higher they will rank you. There is no bidding system or anying. You just agree with them a rate and they will add you to the directory in an agreed position. Although I think that it changes as stores people join and agree positions.

I'm worried that once overture gets their hands on it the prices will sky rocket although it may be a fairer system.

[shorebreak]

Interesting discussion. Kelkoo, in my opinion, didn't have any special relationship with Google; they just did a great job of going after the huge oppty that massive SEO affords. As an arbitrage play (like NexTag, Shopping.com or any other CSE) they are constantly trying to get traffic for cheaper than they sell it.

I wonder, though, if the purchase price truly reflected the changing landscape of SEO and the fact that, going forward, it will be a lot harder to finagle your way high up in rankings, what with PPC and PI growing so predominant.