The UK engines...

Which one's are best?

[metaman]

I am venturing into the UK market and was wondering if anyone knows how many people use AV UK and is it worth my time? I submitted a site that's in av.com and although I have changed the titles since av.com's indexing altaUK decided to snatch them from altaUS's index.

There are some UK pay-per-clicks as well, Godado is one... are they worth my time?

If no one's experimented with all of the pay-per-clicks over there I will try them out and let you guy's know if/how they work (hopefully we don't have a bunch of rocketlinks clones on our hands!).

Cheers Mate! ;)

[tigger]

metaman

sorry I don't know the figures but in the uk if we use AV.com they have a pop up window directing us to AV.co.uk, I don't know if this applies to other counties where AV have a local database.I don't know if this helps drive traffic to .co.uk

sorry not had any experence with UK pay-per-clicks, my only thought is the uk based search engines normally produce pretty poor traffic and I only spend a small amount time submitting to them as I feel most people here use the .com search engines

[rencke]

Those pesky little popups are in use everywhere in Europe where AV has a site (not many blank spots on the map for them) Plus, there is a thread somewhere here at WmW containing the info that AV is going to force their national indexes upon international users sometime in november, by way of an automatic re-direct. Can't find the thread, but I am pretty sure that it was henki who came with the info.

[tigger]

I hope not most of my rankings are on the .com site

[makemetop]

I have good rankings in both AV US and UK. Searches from UK outnumbers that from US by about 7 to 1 - but could be because we are a UK company - hard to tell. Good traffic from Lycos UK because of directory listings and Lycos advertising here.

A lot of people use portals such as Freeserve, Virgin, MSN UK, AOL UK etc. Freeserve and AOL UK use Inktomi (though Freeserve is about to change) MSN UK uses Looksmart UK and US results before Inktomi results. AOL uses Inktomi and Virgin uses Google.

Ask Jeeves UK is also popular and for that you need to be in Mirago and Yahoo.

Google also gives me a lot of traffic through yahoo.co.uk.

Godado is not a prime pay-per-click engine, I'm in it but get barely any traffic. I get some traffic from Splut, Espotting and hopefully will do from Goto UK when it starts in November.

Bottom line is I submit to both UK and US engines for my clients. Most clients, who sell primarily in the UK, get most of their traffic now from the UK versions of the US big players. However it depends a lot on the type of search they are going for and for me...? My traffic is probably 60/40 in favour of the US engines - but conversion to sale is probably the other way round.

[mark_roach]

Good solid advice from Makemetop. I can concur with all that he says. It is worth pointing out that Lycos UK is a separate database from Lycos.com. I think Lycos UK still uses its own DB populated by T-Rex.

I get much better traffic from Alta UK than AV.com. Probably due to 3 factors. 1 the re-directs, 2 scooter still deep crawls (I have 30 times as many pages in AV UK), 3 it is less competetive than AV.com.

I also signed up for free Godado trial months ago. I don't think I have had much more than a couple of visitors in total from them.

[metaman]

Thank you all very much.

From a business standpoint, it's great that they are encouraging countries' to use their respective index. That was one of my main concerns, if anyone in the UK uses altaUK or if they just use av.com. This will especially allow targeting of niche country-specific markets in the future when everyone is online.

Who is Freeserve switching to for results?

Oh yeah, you gotta love the British Scooter.. That little bugger is quite energetic compared to his lazy American counterpart! ;)

[engine]

Hi metaman,
freeserve will switch to goto uk which will be supplemented by Ink. I've not heard that UK plus will be dropped so that directory may still be valuable.

[Severina]

I get hardly any traffic from Godado, none at all from espotting, some from Splut, some from Goto, but the most comes from sposored keywords on Google of all places!

[tigger]

As excite.co.uk is currently undergoing a massive advertising campaign on most billboards around here, maybe we will see some traffic from them soon.