Forum Moderators: phranque
Ooooooh, good one mayor! I'm making a thread out of this. -rcj
>>I wish they'd quit wrecking the store <<
How true! The search engines are not good business partners. Alta Vista, Google, Inktomi ... have all played the disappearing act without warning and without clear cause and forewarning. Even the PPC engines are aloof and adversarial as business partners. Then the SE's wonder why their revenues inadequate. They come up with one-sided "partnerships" with web sites willing to pay and price them outside the envelop of rational return on investment ... all without any reasonable agreement that stable revenues can be expected.
Website business models built on guerilla warfare tactics are more likely to survive than those built on diplomacy.
The first search engine that truly embraces the commercial websites as their business partners and works together with them as respected and valuable business partners will be a winner.
(edited by: rcjordan at 10:37 am (utc) on May 22, 2002)
Could you please elaborate on this statement?
I would like to learn more about website biz models.
Fundamentally, the search engines can't survive without web sites and many web sites can't survive without the search engines, but their goals have not been congruent. The search engines want pure un-manipulated sites and the web sites want to manipulate their rankings to the top of the search engine listings, so we have an unresolved conflict.
Both sides employ clandestine tactics in an attempt to achieve their objectives. The search engines have the upper hand and most of them are a bunch of techies still learning the skills of applying diplomacy to turn their adversaries into win-win business partnerships.
So commercial websites go underground with their survival "optimization" techniques and the search engines spend great amounts of time, energy and money trying to ferret the "spammers" out of their indices.
Great soundbite, mayor! And a good summary, too. (I'll be quoting you at a tourism conference next month.)
Be subversive :) [webmasterworld.com...] ... but thats a tad OT, but I guess denial employed with guerilla warfare is a neat combination :)
Much depends on the long-term plans for the site. A super-pro affiliate running up hundreds of sites on printer cartridges obviously is willing to risk more for position than a Fortune 500 site.
There's also a BIG change that happens if/when a guerrilla site reaches high market share... they may find that they can no longer risk all, rolling double-or-nothing looks increasingly foolhardy once you get used to the revenue stream or achieving whatever your original goal might have been.
"Bulls make money, Bears make money, Pigs get slaughtered"
I think most of the major SE complaints come from the latter camp.
My rule no. 1 ... the dice roll every day.
You're going to have casualties. Plan for casualties and have fresh forces already mobilized.
I just got a site dumped from a major search engine (Inktomi) that had been stable for over two years, and no changes had been made in several months other than to remove some cross linking to another site in an attempt to get it back into the graces of Google.
Remember Alta Vista's Black Monday? The rapid demise of Alta Vista? Goto upping the ante from a penny to a nickle? Remember Infoseek/Go going down the hopper? Excite too! Google PR0? Looksmart's bait and switch to PPC? ... the list goes on and on ... those were all rolls of the dice and I don't think any amount of planning would have protected us from taking casualties in those skirmishes.
My best estimation is that if you sit on your butt and do nothing, the traffic to your "stable" sites will fall by at least 50% within six months.
My best estimation is that if you sit on your butt and do nothing, the traffic to your "stable" sites will fall by at least 50% within six months
I totally agree with this. A number of my sites have been untouched for a couple years and the traffic drops every couple of months. I am constantly putting up new sites to take the place of those and I know that some of my sites will get banned by some engines or end up with a PR0 or something like that.
A super-pro affiliate running up hundreds of sites on printer cartridges obviously is willing to risk more for position than a Fortune 500 site
This statement couldn't be more true. If an affiliate site of mine gets banned it is cheap and easy to get another one up and running. In most cases it can be worth the risk if the traffic is strong for only a couple of weeks. Obviously it would be great to keep that traffic rolling but I don't get too upset when I wake up and the traffic dies for a site.
