Pandia Search Engine Weblog February 2003

(February 26 2003) Pay-per-click text ad provider Overture has bought the AltaVista and Fast Web search engines. So what is a competitor like Espotting to do?

Read about Espotting's comments on the Overture/Fast deal.

Overture acquires Fast's Web search unit

(February 25 2003) We certainly didn't see this one coming: Overture has published a press release saying that the pay-per-click search engine company will buy Fast's Web search division.

Overture doubles minimum bid

(February 10 2003) Overture is one of the most important pay-per-click text ads providers on the Net. When Overture changes its price structure, this has consequences for the whole industry.

The last time Overture raised its minimum bid (from 1 to 5 cents per click-through), they lost many small companies and Web sites as their customers. By bidding for obscure search terms and misspellings these sites could get a decent amount of targeted traffic for a reasonable price.

Unfortunately, the administrative costs for Overture are the same, regardless of the size of the bid. Hence it actually makes sense to get rid of these low cost bids and work on attracting the larger and more affluent customers instead.

Overture has achieved this by partly by raising prices and partly by grouping search terms, so that related search queries (like singular and plural) are counted as one. This makes it much harder to find lucrative low-cost search queries.

Now Overture US has raised the minimum bid to 10 cents. The famous Fantomaster gives the following comment:

"This self-declared 'moderate price increase' amounts to nothing less than a price increase of 100% - if that is supposed to be "moderate", it begs the question what would qualify for exorbitant (if not downright usury) in Overture's view."

Existing lower bids will be "grandfathered," -- i.e. kept as they are, with the exception of bids below $0.05, which will be raised to 0.05 from March 29, 2003.

Overture UK has also raised its minimum bid -- to 10p. Any bids under 10p will stay unchanged until 29th March. However, if you do change them, they will acquire a new minimum of 10p.

So what is a Web site owner with a limited budget to do? There are alternatives, although few with the same reach as Overture.

Several of the medium sized pay-per-click search engines allows even lower bids (see for instance Kanoodle, Ah-ha, FindWhat -- cf. our list of pay-per-click search engines). These three will deliver traffic, although not the same amount as Overture.

However, Google AdWords still allows a 5 cent minimum. It is probably a bit harder to administer, but it can deliver a lot of visitors. Buyers may also like to take a look at Espotting, one of Europe's major pay-per-click search engines.

On selecting the right keywords and search phrases

(February 8 2003) In this second article in a series on basic search engine marketing and optimization techniques Andy Beal takes a look at how to select the right keywords in your search engine optimization campaign.

Click here to read his article on keywords and search phrases!

French site on search engines

(February 8 2003) David Degrelle of the French SEO company 1ère-Position tells us that there will be a new version of their newsletter on search engines available from February 10. The accompanying site is already online. Go to Secrets 2 Moteurs for daily news about the world of search engines and search engine optimization.

In cooperation with the Web statistics company Xiti Degrelle & Co. have also launched a site devoted to statistics on French language search engines called Baromètre 1ère Position. The statistics are based on data gathered from 75.000 French speaking Web sites.

The 1ère Position site also includes two frequently updated weblogs on the world of searching: the more general Weblog 1ère Position (FR) and a blog focusing on Google

We have included permanent links to the two sites in the left hand margin of this page, with additional links to the English Babelfish translations.

New version of PagePromoter

(February 7 2003) The Latvian (not Ukrainian as we claimed) search engine submission and rank checking software PagePromoter has been updated to version 5.2.

The new version includes minor bug fixes and a faster submission speed. The application interface has been translated to over ten European languages, including: Bulgarian, Catalan, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

There is a special, time-limited, 50% discount for Eastern European users from countries outside the EU.

Special offer from Kanoodle to Pandia readers

(February 3 2003) Pandia has made a special agreement with the Kanoodle pay per click search engine. Kanoodle is offering readers of Pandia a free $5 account. A deposit is not required.

This gives you an excellent opportunity to try out keywords and queries for free.

Kanoodle will deliver your listings to thousands of search enabled sites on the net, Mamma.com, 37.com, IxQuick, C4.com, Oingo, CNET and Galaxy included.

Click here to get it!

To cloak or not to cloak

(February 1 2003) French Enfin has an interesting interview with Tim Mayer of the search engine company Fast that might be of interest (and yes, it is in English).

On the question of spam he says that: "We consider spam to be pages that deliberately trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality search results. There is no specific technique that we consider spam. spam is more about how and to what extent a specific technique is used."

Is cloaking (i.e giving search engine spiders pages that are different from the ones read by human visitors) OK? Not according to Mayer: "There are specific techniques that can be used appropriately but are used to spam in the majority of cases. Cloaking would be one of these techniques."

The discussions on what is cloaking and what is not is getting more and more complicated. This is important for webmasters who want to know what is acceptable and what is not. Brett Tabke of Webmaster World has written a new excellent article on the topic, where he tries to distinguish between various types of cloaking.

Another article that tries to tackle this question is found in the High Rankings Advisor newsletter . Alan Perkins argues that cloaking is "always a bad idea".

He gives a quick rule of thumb to help you understand what cloaking is: "if you need to know a search engine's IP address or some details from its HTTP request (e.g., its user agent name) in order to deliver content, you are probably cloaking. If you don't need that information, then you are certainly not cloaking."

XML feeds (i.e. lists of webpages and page descriptions delivered to search engines in paid inclusions agreements) are not cloaking, according to Perkins.

In a related discusion on I Help You forums, Dannys Sullivan of Search Engine Watch begs to differ: "Alan, who I have great respect for, is incorrect in my view when he says that XML feeds are not cloaking.They are. They show spiders one thing and users the other."

Does it matter? Only if you are using techniqes that may trigger the anger of the search engines. Rest assured, if you are paying the search engines for the right to deliver them XML feeds, you will not be banned.

New search engine optimization forum

(February 2 2003) Do we need yet another search engine optimization discussion forum? We already have Webmaster World, Search Engine Forums, I Help You, Spider Food, Cre8asite -- and that's not all of them. Well, Chris Ridings certainly seems to think so. In an interview with Search Engine Blog he says that:

"I visit the bulletin board style forums a lot and have seen their potential to allow fully open discussion in a way that helps progress the industry. For that reason, I have designed a bulletin board system at http://www.searchguild.com/ that has been built from the ground up to enable people to speak freely and honestly. My presence there, should people choose to come, is really only in an administrative capacity to provide the facility."

Now, if Chris Ridings chooses to take actively part in those discussions, it might certainly be worth a visit.

By the way, Search Guild is the first forum to have its own IE Explorer toolbar. It takes more than that to build a loyal following of SEO experts, however, and it remains to be seen if the forum will succeed.

Chris Ridings is known for his Search Engine Optimization Support Forums, which -- in spite of the name -- has been more like a gateway to his own reflections on search engine marketing than a forum. Support Forums will now be taken over by one Ollee, the owner of Rankpilot, an online tool for checking search engine result rankings.

Please note: The links on archived search engine news pages will not be updated!

Search Engine News Weblog Archive February 2003

Espotting on the Overture/Fast deal