I must admit I am impressed. I knew Google was popular, but not this much. My main site was hit during the last update. Every single keyword vanished. I don't know what I did, but I triggered a penalty and got wiped out of Google. Not banned, just penalized. I was surviving with Yahoo and MSN's traffic. My keywords were top 20 at Yahoo, top 5 at MSN. Traffic dropped 50%. Today I am back up. My logs show loads of referrals from Google, traffic is pouring in, stats show an average of 35 users online every time I check in. It is just amazing how powerful Google is.
One thing I've noticed though is the conversion ratio of Google users (if you are selling something) is MUCH lower than Yahoo/MSN users. Probably has something to do with Google users generally being smarter.
When you took your slogan off of Digital Point that is when it happened Fryman, Digital Point is powerful, not Google.
Ive noticed that Traffic from those engines are also very good Adsense clickers. I have a few sites that just get traffic from MSN and Yahoo, and CTR is incredibly high He he... nope, Anthony, I actually changed my slogan AFTER I started getting back my traffic from Google
Totally. Those who have that busy/cluttered/portal mentality are probably more suceptible to online marketing
Yes I noticed google is very powerful also, but some reason google will only index my main page. nothing else....
I've noticed the same thing when it comes to CTR for ads, especially for MSN traffic. I consider myself a saavy Google user. However, I frequently do searches and find myself browsing the search and content ads at least as much, if not more, than the natural results. For example, I'm researching a honeymoon to Hawaii right now. Many of the natural results I found were poor quality sites focusing on affiliate links. The ads I clicked on had higher quality pictures and more detailed information than the natural results. This is just one example. But the more I learn about SEO and Internet marketing, the more I look at the ads. Sometimes ads = marketing budget = better quality site.
Very powerful...I staggered out of the sandbox about a week ago. Til then I had tons of Yahoo traffic - 5:1. It has taken exactly a week for Google to pass Yahoo's six month's worth of traffic.....
Google is only as powerful as you allow it to be... My main money making site (HustlerPanties.com), also dropped out of Google in the December update and I was pretty nervous. Luckly, sales stayed steady (even increasing, as usual), even with the lack of Google traffic. It is so important not to put all of your eggs in one basket because the internet/seo can be so unstable. I've spent plenty of time on off line marketing and customer service (I have lots of repeat customers) and when I dropped out of Google, I was SO happy to see that it actually paid off. Now, I am back in Google, just like you Fryman. I wonder why we were dropped out in Dec?
this I believe is because Google is seen as the number 1 source for information. msn and Yahoo! are good to find businesses (especially local businesses on msn's "near you") but Google is still the one with major emphasis on content info.
I work in a marketing firm that manages PPC campaigns for clients. I've noticed that Google searches tend to be more 'research' oriented, while Yahoo and MSN searches are more 'consumer' oriented. We get about 30-50% more clicks from Google Ads, but the converion rate is lower then Overture, so the actual sales tend to be about even.
I let my overture account go to zero and this week has been great. Overture seems to not send over very good leads. We never use the content match, and resently discovered that some crap site munky .com has the overture listings and when I wrote to overture they said that we don't pay for those clicks because munky isn't a part of their program - ya right!
I wish they'd take me back. I'm gong to convert to non-dynamic links over the w/e and see how much difference that makes over the next month or so. It can't hurt and since G does place emphasis on file names, changing my dynamic page naming convention to use static urls with a modrewrite like filter I bought for my IIS server, I hope it makes a significant difference.
Google is probably the weakest of the 3 major SE's. It is the most popular, but because of it's expansion, the search engine is not as powerful as it looked a couple years back compared to it's competitors.
I will have to agree - google is losing its strength, however, I don't think they will go down, but they better start fighting a little more. MS has the resources, and if they stick with the plan they will kick some butt, yahoo is pretty week already, kind of like an aol, where most people that use yahoo are not very web savvy.
I have not seen any increase at all from my MSN visitors. Being a new engine, I'd expect to be getting more and more visitors as the engine gains popularity. However, that isn't happening, MSN seems to be stuck in 3rd place, and I don't see any improvement at all.
#4 compared to my #87 for our shared competitive kw.. I'm a bit jealous but odds are sooner or later I'll break the top 20 again, I'm guessing 14 if allinanchor: stays steady.