Recent Search Engine Changes

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Over the past 8 weeks or so, we have seen many changes among the search engines. Search engines changing their ranking algorithms or the nature of their service is nothing new, however so much has happened in such a short amount of time that I though it would be beneficial to talk about much of what has happened recently and how all of it might affect you.

Last year we saw the demise of NBCi search and InfoSeek/Go, two high profile search services. This year we have already seen the demise of Excite and Direct Hit. Within the past month or so Google has added PPC listings, LookSmart converted over to PPC listings and Overture lost a major PPC listing account. And the following search engines have added new pay-for-inclusion services: AltaVista, All The Web (Fast/Lycos), and Ask Jeeves/Teoma.

Good thing I’m here to keep up with all of this. Lets take a look at these independently…

EXCITE
Early this year excite filed for bankruptcy and as a result they replaced their independent ranking results with paid advertisers from Overture. NBCi and Go.com did the same thing last year which resulted in an immediate drop of searches, as relevancy decreased considerably. If you purchase Overture listings you’ll appear on Excite, but again, without much traffic to its search portal, Excite is no longer a major player in the search engine wars.

DIRECT HIT
Direct Hit has always been unique in that it rated sites primarily on the basis of who gets the most hits. Sites that were “hit” more often moved up in rankings while those that received fewer visitors moved down.

Recently Ask Jeeves, which owns Direct Hit, rolled out a new search engine called Teoma. When you visit Direct Hit you are told that their services has been rolled into Teoma and are then promptly redirected. Teoma provides some pretty powerful and relevant results and allows you to refine your search with a click of the mouse.

Currently, Teoma and Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) are producing identical results, but each with a different set of search tools.

LYCOS
In the same way that Ask Jeeves and Teoma’s results are identical, Lycos and one of their their other properties, All The Web (aka Fast) also show identical results. All The Web is another powerful search tool, outperforming its partner Lycos before their results consolidation.

One of the things in all this that I find ironic is that if a business were to submit two sites with identical content to the search engines, both sites would likely be penalized, however search engines such as Ask/Teoma and Fast/Lycos seem to make exceptions for themselves.

GOOGLE
Google’s Ad Words Program has been upgraded to a pay-per-click service. Google’s version is a slight modification over other PPC services in that they attempt to account for relevancy in ranking ads rather than the highest bidder wins formula.

Another difference with Google is that their PPC advertisements look like advertisements and are set apart from the general results. This ultimately means less clicks for the advertiser, but allows the searcher to clearly see what is unbiased content and what is a paid advertisement.

Finally, Google just struck a deal to provide search results with AOL. As of now Google’s PPC ads are showing up over at AOL and Google’s general results will start appearing later this summer.

LOOKSMART
They may look smart, but they sure act dumb! By now many who have paid money to be included in LookSmart’s directory have heard about their new program. They have essentially converted their entire directory into a pay-per-click system rather than their previous one-time inclusion system which was similar to Yahoo.

One of the major problems with this per-click system is that, unlike other PPC, you don’t get to choose your search terms that you pay for. Most sites have hundreds of top search engine positions, most that they don’t even know about, because they are being ranked on terms that are not relevant to your target audience.

For example, if you sell swimwear and somewhere in your text you have the sentence “Throw off your winter coats and jump in the water!”, you potentially can receive top search engine rankings for the term “winter coats”. With LookSmarts new program, you get charged every time somebody clicks on your site, forcing you to pay for many irrelevant click-thrus. Anybody who manages a PPC account knows that relevancy is important. Without keeping a tight reign on your search terms you can find yourself paying hundreds of dollars for clicks that don’t turn into sales, which is exactly what LookSmart is now asking their customers to do.

For those of you who are currently a LookSmart “valued customer”, LookSmart was gracious enough to provide $15 worth of free clicks each month over the next 20 months. Once you have reached 100 clicks, however, your site is in danger of being pulled from the database unless you pony up more cash. Many site owners are now being asked to add $70, $400 or over $1000 each month to keep their listing active.

I have upgraded my listings in LookSmart to receive the 100 clicks over the next 20 months, however I don’t plan to use LookSmart and will not encourage anyone else to use them unless and until they change their current program and/or honor the agreements made to those who already paid $299 to be included in the directory indefinitely.

With all of these recent changes there still has not been much more than the normal amount of fluctuation in top positions that I’ve seen. I cannot, however, attest to how this is affecting traffic as a whole. Hopefully things will begin to settle down again (unlikely, as it appears that there is a chance that Google will be replaced on Yahoo).

Regardless of what the search engines do, what is of primary importance in achieving top search engine listings is quality content

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Tags: Directories, Google, LookSmart, Search Engines
Posted in Search & Marketing