There's a new one out - ukplanet.com At the moment it's very empty but when I was checking links a couple of days ago, I noticed one was from my entry there. It's gone now - or I can't find it (I didn't take enough note of where it was) but it must show they are trying.
They've got a new twist of counting hits to your site - or from, if you put a link to them.
Brett, agreed, i did feel that it's worth a review of the majors and then introduce the many "others" as we go along.
I was surprised how many there were and there are going to be more specialised, vertical market directories coming on stream. These smaller, vertical market directories will provide much smaller numbers of "hits" but, the "hits" will be better qualified.
I'll plan to do a review here this weekend.
Oldtimer - I'd like to ask you to review this with me before I post the thread - hope you've got time.
For me Inktomi is the king. They power many of the ISP's in the UK, Freeserve, NTLWorld, BTInternet, AOL etc etc. I find the referrers from Freeserve to be not much less than Yahoo Ink.
mediocre:
The UK offshoots of the big .com search engines.
UK specific Mirago is one to keep an eye on, they are doing a bit of advertising in the magazines and are tied in with ask.co.uk.
or a waste of time:
The UK directories. UK Plus [at which I have a *great* listing] is a particular disappointment.
I find the best use for the minor UK directories is to get a quick listing and use this to either build link pop or establish some prior to submission.
I will certainly have a look over the next few days.
Longer term I have a site targeted at a uniquely UK search phrase, the site is fairly new but already listed at a few of the engines.
It is not the most competitive field and all listings thus far have been Top 3, I expect this to continue.
As the rankings will be almost the same across the .com and .co.uk engines this should give an excellent idea of the ratios. When the data builds up I will repost.
Remind me if I forget!
Total Visitors 6043
Int'l Engines UK Engines
AOL 17 AOL UK 46
Alta Vista 432 AV UK 106
Excite 299 Excite UK 748
Google 455
GoTo 54
Hotbot 22
Infoseek 9
Looksmart 26
Lycos 56
MSN 158 MSN UK 98
Netscape 71
North. Light 74
Open Direct. 10
Snap 7
Yahoo (Ink) 119
Freeserve 94
Shopsmart 30
Ask 163
To be honest, I think all that the figures prove is that I've got better rankings on some engines than others !!.
It's frustrating that WPG doesn't report positions on the UK engines, I know that I've got excellent positions on Google, Excite and Northern Light in the international engines, but haven't got around to manually checking Excite UK to see why we get so many hits from them.
I agree with NFFC - a lot of these are powered by Inktomi which is a good place to target for UK users.
Virgin net uses Google. Breathe and Freeserve use Inktomi. I thought that BTinternet used excite.co.uk - has this changed now? Demon also uses excite.
Altavista.co.uk is a major disappointment to me currently - maybe that will change when they launch their free service soon.
BTInternet use both Ink and Excite. The search box at the Top right of the page is INK, bottom right is Excite.
Couldn't agree more about AV.co.uk, which is a shame as it's so easy!!. Hope you are right about things changing when the free service starts.
Also it has been said elsewhere that from Sept requests from UK surfers will auto direct to av.co.uk [as in MSN].
Still not enough info from the site to draw any conclusions, it is a very targeted phrase and maybe the amount of data will never be enough to establish a .co.uk versus .com pattern.
On the bright side:
I now have access to the statistics of over 3,000 UK domains [referrer and keyword data only] so over the next few weeks should have a better idea of the bigger picture.
Quandary: valuable data, should I post? Of course, as there are many good people here. But what about the career lurkers, those who will never post and help others, should they have the data?
You refer to Excite and Lycos.co.uk, but I've been submitting to them for months and have never got a ranking with them, not even in the top 100.
I'm using the same algo as .com so I don't know if theirs is different or not, but I've been looking around the forums and most people seen to have some type of problem getting in.
Ross
I too am very disaponted WPG does not support uk search engines I did send an e-mail to them about this and they claim to be looking into this.
Tigger
The UK directories don't appear to have a BIG database. I'd guess they've decided to limit the size. Is the domain a .com? They are often filtered out of the results, even though they are in the db. If that's the case, do get a .co.uk and submit that.
Something happened (not sure what) with excite.co.uk late May / early June. Prior to that I was none existant in their rankings now, for some reason, I have several top rankings and it generates about 16% of my traffic. I just wish I knew what I've done to achieve that:) I don't get anything like this success on excite.com
The same pages in lycos.co.uk have mixed results - some key phrases are top 10 and some are non-existant.
As a comparison Lycos.co.uk sends me 3% of my traffic and ifind (freeserve)send me around 10%.
Anyone know of a good ranking reporting tool that supports the major UK engines?
they were .uk domains, I've just change the algos around and have re submitted so lets wait to see any idea how long from submission to indexing excite/lycos take ?
Terry
if you ever get details of anything that will check rankings I'll be very interested in knowing about it, as I use WPG to check my rankings, which i find a very usefull tool, as I use it within their scheduler and it's nice to wake up and see what rankings i have, at least now that inktomi is playing the game.
perhaps we should through down the gauntlet to all these program writers and see what they can come up with
Thanks for the tip - I'll give it a try.
follow the link it will tell you just how wonderfull their program is ( their words ) i use WPG and prefer it
www.topdog2000.com
