Is AV still on your do or die list?

Irrespective of SEO, what do your users want....

[FreeBee]

In mid 95, one of our select keywords returned only 9 results. Nowadays we still feature in the top 10 of 10k but that’s only after I’ve deliberately bypassed the regional redirection because it’s irrelevant and then scrolled past a very determined set of paid features (we’re not there simply because GoTo’s value of 1c a year back would have been too much and 5c now would be very extravagant branding.)

Back in the early days, we’d found a real niche on the web. Our target market matched the demographic of some of the early adopters and AV was an excellent source of business, not just referrals. One Monday in October 99 seemed to be the point when we started parting ways with AV for several reasons – the bottom line now is that referral numbers have practically disappeared and new sources of qualified traffic have come up since. The unfortunate thing is that we don’t bother too much trying to feature on AV in 2001.

Is this a mistake? AV used to be on our do or die list and I have an inbred respect for my elders but ….

Rotating results? What the heck is actually going on here? Is anybody honestly meant to keep track?

Optimization? In November last year we took two very topic-relevant sites (one old, one new, neither with kw in domain or file name) and optimised (standard stuff, no hard core effort, we were thinking Google) with pretty acceptable results by March - very competitive industry-standard keyword phrase. We sat together in the top 5 with some of our fiercest rivals of several years standing (online and in real life) on the one hand and one spammy top 10 entrant on the other. It just went to show that legitimate optimisation worked. The real problem is that it did “squat” for results – we track referrals methodically. (Incidentally both sites on that phrase are 70+ today…scattered pretty much shotgun-like with our competitors.)

Grandfather status? On an even more competitive keyword we’ve always done battle with AV old-timers and respected enemies across the full SE/directory/PPC spectrum. How come one practically redundant site of ours established 97, last tweaked in 98, last updated in January this year has now crept past our best efforts (and those of our competitors) on new and older sites in the last 12 weeks?

What about the newborns? A mature understanding of our markets and web-usability lead to a new site in April. The directories, Fast and Google have obviously enjoyed this new and well-conceived content (as suggested by referrals) but no manner of manual submission has resulted in anything other than indexing of the actual pages submitted to AV (despite a bunch of heavy deep crawls by AV bots since the PFI date). Every indexed page is well buried despite the L$ listings etc. (OK it’s early days still.) The problem may be that unless we pay, AV may still treat this site as stillborn.

My problem isn’t one of payment. It’s about a far more relevant issue – users and relevance. AOL and MSN are a broad demographic on the one hand and generate fair traffic. Yahoo/Google is a killer referrer on the other. Northern Light is a remote but very specific source of traffic at the other end of the scale. Where is AV? It simply doesn’t exist for us by any stretch of the imagination. So payment isn’t a point of discussion.

More so and very specifically, what about our users? This is the real acid test. Joe Soap from AOL doesn’t know better but the target market we sought a few years ago does – they don’t use AV anymore.

So with total respect to the business managers and engineers at AV, where does AV actually sit on your do or die list especially when you want real users to do business with you now?

[rcjordan]

Do or die? No, just habit. Here are the stats from a 'money' page I've been tracking 16 weeks now. AV weighs in at less than 3%, this is in the range of what others have reported.

Yahoo - 59.82%

MSN Search - 19.50%

Google - 6.93%

Excite - 4.40%

Altavista - 2.45%

Looksmart - 2.23%

(edited by: rcjordan at 1:47 am (gmt) on Aug. 14, 2001

[Woz]

Until they die, I do!

Onya
Woz

[startup]

AV is still on my "to do" list. The SE doesn't rate as a top producer but, at times it outproduces Fast and Excite.
My business is built on long term clients and any new client is welcome. AV still produces new clients at a steady rate, so I see no need to give up.
This update has nothing to do with the paid sites. My sites have hit top 10 on many commercial search terms, none are paid listings.

[Bentler]

I think the old AV demographic must have moved on to Google. I still get traffic from them but not like the old days. I don't know how they rank their results anymore, really, so I don't put much effort into them.

Here's an SE referral breakdown for last month from my site:
Google 34%
Yahoo 18%
Internal SE 15%
MSN 9%
AV 7% - 1900
AOL 6%
Goto 3%
Excite 2%
Dogpile 2%
Hotbot 2%
Lycos .7%
Northern Light .5%
Directhit .4%
Looksmart .4%
All the web .1%

[lawman]

July breakdown:

Google 21.7%
MSN 20.7%
Yahoo 16.1%*
Excite 06.6%
AOL 04.7%
Alta 03.8%

August to Date Breakdown:

MSN 19.6%
Google 18.5%
Yahoo 17.8%*
AOL 15.7%
Excite 05.8%
Alta 03.9%

Since AOL changed the way they display the paid INK results, my AOL traffic has increased substantially.

Lawman

*Includes both Directory and Google Index.

[markd]

My clients still 'perceive' AV to be important and they want to be in it. Once I help them interpret their logs, and they see a declining return from AV, they slowly start to change their opinion - but very slowly.

Next on their wish list seems to be Yahoo (directory), MSN, Google and Lycos.

My guess is that marketing activity by the SE's influences their perceptions almost as much as traffic itself!
If the SE is 'visible' then clients want to be in it, even if it yields little traffic.

The above does seem to vary slightly, dependant on the client/market/audience, but not by much.

[rencke]

AV is definitely not on the do or die list anymore. They have dropped out of both Nielsen/NetRating's Top 25 list [pm.netratings.com] and Jupiter/MMXI's Top 10. My guess is that their global market share is down to less than 5%, as witnessed by several logs quoted here. My log shows 11,8%, but a lot of my traffic is from Sweden where - for historical reasons - AV used to have a bigger market share than anywhere else in the world, and probably still does.

[FreeBee]

Thanks all for the valuable input - it's made the decision easier.

We'll be tracking as always and on the look out for some sort of AV turnaround in the future. In the meantime we need to get results and that means effort elsewhere.

[mark_roach]

Just to buck the trend here are the stats from the last two days for some of my sites:

305: [altavista.com...]
274: [search.lycos.co.uk...]
216: [ask.co.uk...]
201: [search.msn.com...]
157: [search.msn.co.uk...]
118: [uk.altavista.com...]
86: [search.lycos.com...]
76: [goto.com...]
47: [aolsearch.aol.com...]
36: [google.com...]
33: [search.dogpile.com...]
33: [auto.search.msn.com...]
33: [search.sli.sympatico.ca...]
31: [ifind.freeserve.com...]

When you lose nearly all your pages from google, thank goodness for AV :)

[rcjordan]

Anyone making a pun re AV 'going to the dogs' will be banned. ;)

[minnapple]

Dead dog in the middle of the road and it is stinking to high heaven.

[angiolo]

Most of the traffif I get from Altavista comes from the GoTo listing, no matter if I am on the top on the "standard" AV listing.

It seem to me that people prefer to click the "partner listing".

Last week Altavista was rotating results; in these days it seems more stable.

I noticed several recent entries on the top and a bigger number of results.

Top sites usually have less than 5 % keywords density: relevant keywords on title and Metatag description.

[rcjordan]

mark_roach, just to clarify, do you have a GoTo listing passing through to AV?

[msgraph]

I've just re-checked a few things and believe I mentioned some of this before about the PFI in another thread

One rotation of the results is showing around 14,000 pages found. That is where my PFI listing is at. I went pretty deep into the results (page 25) and ALL the pages have dates of late Jul 2001 to Aug 8 2001. I presume this is mainly a new DB containing only new listings. Not sure if they are all PFI or a mix of newly updated sites. I don't think they are all PFI because if they were all the dates would be Aug 8 right?

The other rotation is showing 20,000,000 pages found and all the dates are up to about Jun 2001. Must be the pre-PFI DB.

I still do not see phrase matching displayed on the "The number of documents that contain your search terms" line at the bottom, but it seems they have made a few minor tweaks to the way they display results.

Traffic is terrible. Last year I was getting around 2k-3k hits per day for one site that has the same near position under about three variations of a keyword phrase. Now I'm only getting around 60-70 per day!

[mark_roach]

>>just to clarify, do you have a GoTo listing passing through to AV?

I don't have any Goto listings. I don't even appear to have particularly good rankings. The traffic comes from a wide range of keywords.

[andrey_sea]

Altavista is somewhat important to us, but definitely not "Do or die"

Stats:
Yahoo+google.yahoo 36.95%
Google 32.59%
Excite 26.70%
Altavista 3.24%
MSN Search 0.17%
Askjeeves 0.08%
Mamma 0.08%
Lycos 0.05%

[oilman]

Alta-whosta?

[Woz]

Oh yea of little faith!

[backus]

I think all of us are getting different results. For some it is do or die, for others it's why bother? Just promote for it, then you'll not get into any trouble!

[Robert Charlton]

Even if you don't get traffic directly from AV, a good ranking can boost you on meta-search engines like Ixquick and MetaEureka, and the cumulative contribution to traffic might be worth it. In general, I optimize for Google, and that seems to get me ranking well on AV, so it's not like I'm doing anything I otherwise wouldn't do... except for the submissions.

[Marcia]

>Anyone making a pun re AV 'going to the dogs' will be banned.

ummmmm, rcjordan, has minnapple been around lately? :)

"Dead dog in the middle of the road and it is stinking to high heaven."

<snitch>
See? He did it!
</snitch>

[starec]

Reading this thread I realized that the description of this forum is rather obsolete...

"Altavista is a powerhouse traffic generator. On the webmasters A+ do or die list."

Really?

[rcjordan]

No, not really. We've discussed that subtitle being obsolete. It is, but changing it seems like administering the last rites.

[andrey_sea]

The title should be changed to: "Slowly Fading away search engine"

:-)

[rcjordan]

How about:

"Altavista is a traffic generator, well, sorta. On the webmaster's to-do list."

[mivox]

"On the webmasters' to-do-or-not list"

[pete]

Freebee, combined figures for two websites that we work on that fit slap-bang into your industry.

The figures are only a fair comparative if the listings obtained on the various engines can be shown to illustrate the exposure on each engine. This will give you more of an idea. Listings (Top 20)displayed in brackets.

Their Top 5 split for August:

Websites:

Google: 51.5% (99)
Yahoo.google: 18.8% (136)
Msn: 12.2% (92)
Altavista: 8.3% (118)
Excite: 6.8% (132)

This serves as an idea only. It would be a better reflection if we broke the top 20 positions up as well as display the pulling power of the individual search terms)

When I started with these websites (About 2 years ago), 60% of their traffic used to come from the Yahoo! directory.

One of the sites is featured in the sponsored listings + popular listings and does o.k in the Yahoo search but thats still not enough to get it into our top 5 search portal referers.

So.. Ala Vista still does o.k.

[FreeBee]

Pete

Our own figures are naturally comparable with yours. For the benefit of others here at WebmasterWorld, we’re in the same industry, similar products/services and in many cases we compete for the same keywords. We also share a similar “spread” across the engines/directories (Pete’s team has more content out there). Importantly, we both target the same demographic.

Two things stand out. Firstly, the weight of Google/Yahoo traffic (we’re in the same boat). The second is your reference to the relative “pulling power” of individual search terms – my guess is that you’re also finding an increasing bias towards fewer terms producing the real results. (More focussed optimisation would obviously fuel part of this trend.)

My problem is an increasing sense of exposure – too many eggs in one basket. Unless we see a resurgence in some of the older engines (particularly AV, Excite and even Lycos) or new engines (maybe Wisenut, Teoma) I suspect that we’re going to be competing more heavily in the pay-for-play arena (BT’s recent thread on Google [webmasterworld.com] will be well worth watching). The other option would be to start concentrating a bit more on alternative markets.

I’m sorry to say that our AV traffic doesn’t warrant fresh effort. No doubt you’ll alert us if you see an uptick in yours. :)

[skibum]

One phrase (GoTo around 1000 searches a month) for which a site is ranked #1 on AV (and has been for eons w/o any optimization yields about 5 hits a month. A #2 ranking on Google for the same phrase yields 2-3 hundred referrals. We still submit to AV, but would never pay the fees for their inclusion programs.