What is Altavista UK:USA ratio?

How many Britons use each?

[Machiavelli]

Does anybody know how many people in the UK use altavista.com compared to altavista.co.uk ? I still don't see a great deal of traffic from .co.uk despite some reasonable listings.
Any thoughts anyone?

[makemetop]

I think it depends on the search subject matter. I get ten times the traffic from .co.uk than I do from .com because I am targeting the UK market and search terms on .com are optimised for use with the prefix or suffix UK, whereas on .co.uk they come up as the more generic search terms. I also get a great deal of traffic from ask.co.uk since they started using the AV UK results.

However I have clients who are focussing on a world-wide market and .com works better for them.

[sugarkane]

Last week my #2 on .com pulled in nearly 10 times as many as my #1 on .co.uk (same keyword)

FWIW I see a very similar ratio for Yahoo(gle) as well.

[NFFC]

Like for like on competitive phrases running at 7 to 1 in favour of .com, that is much less of a ratio than a few months ago when the split was 12 - 1.

[Machiavelli]

Thanks for that lot; do any of you know what volume of the av.com traffic is from Britons however? You see, a few of the sites I deal with will only deliver to the UK, so even if we get a huge number of referals from any .com search-engine, very few of these I should imagine make it to a sale, after weeding out the Americans &c..

It is a fairly tricky thing to calculate I suppose, not least when browsers are using proxies/firewalls/whatever which makes their IP address look as if they are in a another country.

[NFFC]

>do any of you know what volume of the av.com traffic is from Britons

More than the volume from .co.uk

>huge number of referals from any .com search-engine

Sell it back to them.

[Machiavelli]

¿ "Sell it back to them" ?

Either your being cryptic or I'm being slow, NFFC.

[NFFC]

>Sell it back to them

If you've got quality traffic from US surfers someone, somewhere will buy it, take a look at some affiliate programs etc.

Check your sticky mail

[henki]

AV is trying to move Europeans to use the local versions.

I have been studing the Nielsen and the Relevant Knowledge reports for Sweden. The trend is that the local versions is gaining, but the .com still get about 30% more traffic.

[Machiavelli]

henki - do you know if they will do a redirect akin to the www.lycos.com one?

[engine]

Machiavelli, they are using an annoying popup so you are not forced to use the local directory, yet.

[rencke]

>do you know if they will do a redirect

They say they will not force anyone.

Sweden is their best market in Europe percentagewise. Just about everyone has a bookmark for altavista.com. When they partnered with Telia (the government phone company) altavista.se was right there on the users' starting page. When they went different ways, altavista.se became a simple re-direct to altavista.com. Now they have an office in Stockholm for the whole Nordic area, a special and very big index with 9 million pages in the se-domain and a huge market share to protect. (Fast has 4 million and Google claims 67 million).

They want people into the se-machine first, since most local searches are in Swedish for local pages and they are cleaning out foreign pages from the US index, sticking them into the local ones. I guess that is the case all over Europe. But forcing people would cause an outcry, so I don't think they will go as far as that.

[henki]

They have discussed this issue over and over at AltaVista. In may they said that they would do it. But as Rencke says, they have finally choosen not to redirect.

The promotion for the local versions is working. My prediction is that the local versions will dominate next year.

Now we see that every major engine is promoting their local versions.
Big campaigne for MSN right now.