What are Topical Search Engines? Simply put, topical search engines are search engines focused on a specific industry, sector or topic.
While many marketers are scrambling for links, any links, an area that is often overlooked is topic-specific search engines. What many don't realize is that these engines do produce traffic, and they often contain traffic that is very targeted. Anyone who has taken the time to analyze weblogs and track sales sources will likely see that targeted traffic converts at a significantly higher rate than non-targeted traffic.
A savvy online marketer realizes that often, the quality of the visitor is far more important than the quantity of visitors. Web marketers should focus their energies on attracting targeted traffic whenever possible.
In preparing for a presentation I'm going to do in a month or so to a group of catalogue publishers, I decided to do some research to see how search worked to bring traffic to some well known online catalogues. What searches translated into traffic for Lands End, or L.L. Bean, or Victoria's Secret.
The more I dug, with the help of Hitwise, the more surprised I got. In each of these cases, variations of the site's name accounted one half of all search traffic. With Lands End, these variations totaled a little over 48% of all their search referrals. Just over 3% of all search referrals were for www.landsend.com, the exact URL users could have just typed in their address bar.
With L.L. Bean, the total was about 42% and Victoria's Secret was about 63.5%. So, about 1 out of every 2 searches that ended up delivering traffic to these sites appears to be someone who was unsure of the actual URL and thought it would be quicker just to search for it.
I almost missed this one as there was an obscure post relating to MSN and they mentioned it as an aside but Google now has a new way to help you manage your search history.
If you go to Google labs you'll find a new tool called "My Search History" which, when clicked on, allows you to sign into your Gmail account (or create a Google account) and it will store your search history for you. From what terms you searched for but didn't click on any results, to those sites you did visit when clicking on results.
It only seems to work on the main Google search results (no images, news or groups yet) and doesn't seem to work on other regional Google sites (such as Google.ca). But again, I'm sure that will come with time.
OAKLAND, Calif., April 11, 2005 -- Ask Jeeves, Inc. (ASKJ) today introduced an upgrade to MyJeeves, the personal search system seamlessly integrated into the Ask Jeeves search experience at www.Ask.com. Launched last September as the first major search engine to enable users to create their own "Personal Web," MyJeeves allows users to save search queries and results, making it easy to find data they want to use again. With new added features and functionality, MyJeeves is now easier to use, more flexible and more robust.
MyJeeves allows users to manage data saved in their "Personal Web," which can be organized with folders, tagged, searched and shared. The new version of MyJeeves provides more robust information management capabilities, making it easier to collect and organize data, including images. As with previous versions, MyJeeves remains a free service, which requires no registration.
If you haven't already heard, there is a new Google Patent circulating which outlines what may be happening within the Googleplex in terms of rankings now (and in the future).
The fact that most people in our industry have tuned in on seems to be that Google may be weighting links based on various criteria including age, or freshness as well as relevancy. Why everyone is focusing on this, when there are many other topics covered in this patent is beyond me.
Of course if you plan on reading a patent - any patent - may I recommend a large cup of coffee to keep you from nodding off? I did and it helped me. Not to say this, or any other patent, is boring reading. In fact I found this one quite fascinating.
Some webmasters have observed significant ranking changes in Google's search engine result pages. It seems that Google has tweaked its algorithm again or that it is still fine-tuning the way it ranks web pages for its next algorithm update.
By now you are well aware that Ask Jeeves has been bought by InterActiveCorp - A company which has been very active in the past.
We've been watching them for some time now and knew that an acquisition such as this was around the corner.
If you look at IAC's current holdings you would know that about the only place they aren't in the web is search. The AskJeeves purchase puts them firmly in the search marketplace. But what does this mean to you and I - the average searcher? Let me give you some ideas.
A recent study of Nielsen/NetRatings revealed that a minority of searchers exclusively use only one of the top three search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.
One of the highlights of this year's Search Engine Strategies conference in New York (aside from the fact that I got to go to New York and see the city) was the keynote speech by Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!
While the talk was interesting and he did raise a bunch of great points, one that stuck out for me was his notion of Yahoo! (and search in general) as a platform. This idea was mentioned in other sessions as well.
If your web site has good rankings on Yahoo, MSN and other search engines but not on Google, it's likely that your web site has been put into Google's sandbox.
What is Google's sandbox?
In general, brand-new web sites with new domain names need about 6 - 8 months to get top rankings on Google.
The usual process is that Google indexes the new web site, lists it for some less important queries and then the web pages drop from the search engine result pages for several months. Although other search engines work fine, Google doesn't list the web site, sometimes not even for the company name.
If you have a brand-new web site, don't worry about this behavior. You are not doing anything wrong. Google seems to delay the inclusion of new web sites. This phenomenon is called the Google sandbox.