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Seems like SEO's will have less to do now!
G.
It is site dependent, some sites by nature of their structure [size?] will get a very high proportion from Google. I think the true figure is about a third, that leaves 2/3 of the search market to aim at. That's only search, take in to account links from other sites etc and it falls further.
Googlemania is in full flow, while everyone else is targetting the big hitter why not make hay at the other SE's, easy pickings at the moment.
That is the case in situations where little optimisation has been carried out, and this is partly due to the fact that Google is still free to get in to.
It does make all the difference getting the traffic from sources outside of Google.
I don't think SEO's will have less to do.
People talk about targetting MSN or targetting Lycos, but isn't it a load of nonsense? Surely if you pay the inclusion fees to whoever wants them (Inktomi or whoever) then focus primarily on Google you will get good listings on the other engines anyway?
Aren't the principles the same? Well optimised site, niche search phrases and quality, relevant, incoming links.
Or am I missing something big?
Other engines, on the other hand, provide me the ability to actually optimize a page for getting hits. (And, with a nearly 2 month turnaround for Google, anticipating the search terms that will be popular is nearly impossible - with other options, I've got only 24-48 hours of lag time between when I determine that a term will be hot and when it starts bringing hits).
G.
I can definitely see the advantage to a 1-2 day cycle time of getting listed rather than a 1-2 month or more cycle time.
It is definitely feasible to optimize a website or page to have it rank well across the spectrum of search engines. The main thing is to have the site simple in coding and size, plenty of keyword rich content that is all on theme and topic, and follow all of the other basic SEO techniques.
Great topic, in fact one of my many tasks at hand right now is to bring in more traffic from other search engines. Right now I feel I am doing well ( maybe a B-) across the search engines with referrals coming in from google (about 70% of my traffic) yahoo (8%) and the rest of my search referrals coming from other search engines like msn, lycos and alltheweb. I have just got several pages into msn for free how ever they are not ranking too high right now. Last year when I started I did not put meta key words in most of my pages and I think this might be hurting me more on engines like alltheweb and msn (ink) that from what I have heard like a higher amount of keyword density and meta keywords and decriptions. I have also noted that fast has missed many of my pages, why I am not sure.
I have been using webpostion (very carefully) to submit pages and have just read that the upgrade to webpostion includes a spider to help index an intire site in a matter of minutes for submission. This appeals to me simply because I have two very large sites and am always adding more pages. As I add more pages it can get tricky in figuring out which have been added to webpostion and which have not.
Hopefully I will get more pages into these engines for free. With my main site I have not paid for any search engine inclusion,ppc or pay for spidering. This method has worked great for me in that my cost are down and it has allowed me to invest in my new site.
Grumps, are you paying for several urls with ink then? Or have you got some in for free?
Chef Brian
But if I were you I wouldn't abandon the other engines!
The search engines world changes so quick that you can not risk to be unprepared; think about the rapid switch in AOL from Inktomi to Google.
What will happen in Yahoo? Nobody know, but it could be better to rank fine in Inktomi and Fast: maybe Yahoo will choose one of them...
As agerhart explained, it is not so difficult to have good results across the spectrum of search engines. You must monitor you ranking across all the search engines.
Could your business survive the loss of 91% of it's traffic?
Could your business survive the loss of 91% of it's traffic?
No.
But as much as I would like to, I have never seen enough evidence around that there is real SEO work tweaked towards e.g. FAST, Altavista or Inktomi that is essentially different from Google in the medium competitive keyphrase range. (please tell me the tricks if they are known!)
Teoma may be different in that outbound links play a more important role.
The rest is pay your way through as far as I am concerned and that is certainly what I would do, the disastrous day Google would forget or penalise my site.
If Google drops your site, other search engines will not help you extra, however optimised your site may be towards them. The 91% of potential clients are still searching busily on Google.
I would guess that a large English site (international audience), so-called seo'ed to all Search engines, will reap 80% of visitors from Google and its partners at this moment. A lower percentage would suggest a smaller, very local, non-Google-Seo'd site, or someone pulling his purse extravagantly.
If other search engines take over market share from Google that would be rather gradual and not instantaneously.
Nffc and others.
How many months have you had that any of your site(s) have not been in the Google index? (penalties and server-hosting failures aside)
I am trying to make myself believe that if I take care not to try out any fancy SEO stuff and make sure I have enough quality inbound external links (i.e. a high enough Pagerank for Google to come and visit me preferentially), Googlebot will always find me or come back again, if he could not the first time round. (Google said they improved that spider-revisit quality).
I get 10 times the amount of hits from MSN as I do from Google.
Since MSN represents only a modest fraction of total search traffic, it sounds like the site(s) could have a lot more traffic if well-ranked in Google. IMO, Google can easily generate 3x the traffic of MSN assuming good rankings in both. Direct comparisons are a bit tough, as Google has been better at rooting out deeper content.
91% of our traffic has come from Google ... I just do not see any reason for further SEO work
This represents the opposite end of the spectrum, and I guess I'd draw the opposite conclusion, Mahlon. With this kind of reliance on one SE, I'd be investing MORE time in SEO activities. With 90+% of traffic reliant on one source, I'd be working other SEs as well as trying to build a cost-effective PPC and PFI strategy. A database hiccup at Google for a month or two could hurt, and a lasting penalty could be fatal. You may assume that you will never do anything that could cause a penalty, but innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. (E.g., the great content site you linked to last week might get bought and redirected to a spam site.)
The important message that I think most old-timers here would agree with is that things change. SE market shares change, algorithms change, etc. Those who worked on Google rankings early rode a wave of prosperity as Google rose to the top of the heap. If you are on top of Google, then now is the time to be working on alternatives.
it sounds like the site(s) could have a lot more traffic if well-ranked in Google
Yup. It would. But, getting well ranked in the area I'm in is next to impossible at google. My competition all have frontpage ranks of somwhere between 7-9 while my site (new, and creeping up in PR) currently has only 5. That means that for my front page, if I managed an identical keyword density and structure as my competition, I'd still come in somewhere around 40th due to the fact that my competition sites have not only 10 times my 20K pages in the index, but they have international mirrors that all appear above mine in the Google serps.
Fortunately for me, these sites also seem to believe that Google is king and only seem to optimize for Google/DMOZ listings. This leaves the other venues wide open for me.
Deeper into my 1,000,000+ page site, the search terms are much more specific, though they are considerably more competitive due to the "fan site" factor. It's also (at least by my attempts thus far) quite impossible to control what Google puts into its index. Despite my attempts to create a nice little route for Googlebot to crawl my site, once it gets done with the first page, it seems to take whichever route it chooses and, due to the volume of pages, the stuff I NEED indexed to get the traffic I'm looking for just never quite makes it in.
On the other hand, through my Zeal/Looksmart strategy, I can not only control which pages get indexed, but I can do it in a timely fashion. If something newsworthy comes out, I can get it into the L$ directory within 48 hours (though it's been as fast as 6 hours). Since other big sources don't seem to bother with this approach (or they bother with it minimally) I can come out in the top 10 on MSN for virtually every important search - and I've got about 300 search terms that are popular this month (my search term life expectancy for my topic is about 2 weeks to 30 days) which are giving me #1 rankings at MSN - many without a single sponsored link above me.
So yup - it'd be a dream come true to get a higher ranking in Google. In reality though, my competition all have literally tens of thousands of inbound links. As my inbound links increase over the coming years, I'll creep up in the rankings, but until then, there is no way for me to count on Google traffic. Page tweaks seem to help, but with a 60 day turnover, it's nearly impossible to tell.
Also, I've got about 10 deep-linked listings at the DMOZ now. Let's just take the one listing that I estimate to have the highest "search frequency" right now. Between DMOZ, Google, and DMOZ satelites, brought in exactly 4 hits to that page yesterday. That same, virtually identical, listing in the Looksmart and its satelites brought in 82.
I'm going to say that SEO isn't dead, and I'm sticking with it.
G.
You have to include penalties :) 11 months for one site.
One of those things is that they can't have any "buy" words or describe "commercial activities" that can be done on the site in the site description. Which is something I forgot to mention in another thread where we're talking about optimizing for INK...
Anyway, I've spent exactly $40 since my site opened in March for search engine placement and advertising. I've gotten myself up to 1200 uniques a day that way, which isn't great, but with $0 budget (it's a hobby, afterall) I'm not going to complain. My job now is to get a higher percentage of those people who ARE there to buy something and if I can get that to a respectable number, then it starts making sense for me to pay for clicks. Until then, I'll be happy with $0 overhead and see where I stand when all my renewals come up at the end of January.
G.
