The AOL Sweepstakes – A Pirate's Booty
Time Warner is fielding offers for AOL, which has grabbed the attention of MSN, Google and Yahoo. So, what does it all mean in the search engine wars?
Horse and Buggy – AOL
In one of the great bum rushes of all time, Time Warner and AOL merged in 2000. Although it was actually AOL that purchased Time Warner, those in the search engine game snickered at the prospects of the new supposed media giant. Time Warner executives apparently failed to realize AOL was going to have major problems as surfers switched from dial-up to broadband Internet access. Well, Time Warner knows it now and is looking to sell.
As is well known, AOL has an antiquated business model since it dominates a dial-up market that is circling the proverbial drain. As DSL and cable broadband services become widespread, members are bailing on AOL at a prolific pace of millions a year. Time Warner appears to be seeking some way to get out of the loss of revenues, but who would buy a company that missed out on the evolutionary process?
Market Share
Despite the dire outlook, AOL still has tons of members. In fact, between 20 and 21 million people still use the platform. In a very smart move, AOL has also opened itself up to non-members, a move which has resulted in former subscribers continuing to use AOL.com even though they are now on broadband. These numbers represent a significant chunk of the domestic Internet search engine market.
While Yahoo has decided to try to gouge sites with Site Match instead of entering the AOL fray, MSN and Google consider it another part of their ongoing war. There are a variety of reasons for this war, foremost being Google's penchant for swiping…err, hiring executives from Microsoft. With AOL, MSN has a chance to punch back.
Google provides search results to AOL. The Google Adwords advertisements are all over AOL. Hmmm…anyone see why MSN might want AOL? If MSN were to purchase AOL, you can be assured Google would be shown the proverbial door as soon as possible.
Keep an eye on this situation because it the proverbial catch-22 situation. How much is MSN willing to pay for the short term benefits of controlling AOL while knowing it is a turkey in the long term? More so, how much can Google drive up the price MSN is willing to pay? Will Google panic and buy a chunk of AOL to stop MSN? Whatever the result, it will make for good reading.
Whether you like it or not, MSN is finally getting off the mat in the search engine games. It is launching a pay-per-click service for MSN.com, which means Overture or whatever Yahoo is calling it these days is going to lose some luster. If MSN takes the plunge on AOL, it will pick up search engine market share and become a bigger player. With software sales lagging, many think MSN is looking to the Internet as a way to generate revenues.
Let the fun begin.
Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing firm MarketingTitan.com - a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company providing search engine optimization services. Read more Internet marketing articles.
Search Engines – Pieces of the Pie
Advertisers and search engine optimization campaigns are focused on getting the most bang for the buck. To organize your effort, you need to know which search engines have the biggest pieces of the traffic pie.
Subjective Numbers
Ask anyone in the Internet game and they will definitively tell you which search engine is the best. Of course, this often correlates to the actual search engine they use. I once had a person present me with a long winded, yet passionate, diatribe about why AllTheWeb.com was better than Google, MSN and…Yahoo! If I only had a brain, I would surely see that AllTheWeb.com would become the dominant search engine. This I was told with great conviction and more than a few people nodded their heads around us.
Since I was in a particularly bad mood that evening, I hipped the person into the fact that Yahoo provides all the search results on AllTheWeb.com! I even had to pull the site up and show my "teacher" the truth of the matter. So much for making friends!
Many people fall in love with a particular search engine, which is fine. I do it myself. That doesn't mean the search engine in question is the biggest, baddest or best! Subjective views are, well, subjective. Follow them in lieu of objective facts and you run the risk of making huge mistakes.
Objective Numbers
There are two types of results you can look at when calculating search engine traffic percentages. The first represents the total traffic covered by a search engine across all sites it provides results to. The second, which we cover here, refers to only the percentage of searches actually on the engine itself. For instance, Google provides results for AOL. In these figures, the AOL searches are NOT included in Google's totals.
For the first half of 2005, the objective numbers were:
1. Google: 47 percent
2. Yahoo: 22 percent
3. MSN: 12 percent
4. AOL: 5 percent
5. Others: 14 percent
Short, sweet and to the point. Google is clearly eating the biggest piece of the pie. If Google buys AOL, it will grow even more. Conversely, if MSN buys AOL, it will move closer to Yahoo.
When it comes to your marketing, Google is clearly the beast you should focus on. It controls more traffic than Yahoo and MSN combined.
Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing firm MarketingTitan.com - a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company providing search engine optimization services. Read more Internet marketing articles.
Search Engine Database – Are You Indexed?
The vernacular is "build a site and they will come." This cliché is only true if your site is indexed in the relevant search engine database.
Indexing
Search engines are essentially massive databases of domains and sub-domains for sites. When a person searches for something, the search engine instantaneously searches the domain names to come up with relevant listings. The method for doing this differs by engine and involves factors beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we are going to focus on figuring out if your site is in these important databases.
If you want to be included in the rankings on a search engine, your domain name has to be in the search engine database. Put another way, you have to buy a ticket if you want to win the lotto. Your chances of getting free traffic from rankings are far better if you have as many urls from your site included in the database as possible. Having just your home page indexed isn't going to cut it.
If your site has 500 total pages, you ideally want 500 urls included in the search engine index. While this is admittedly a simplification of the situation, the more pages included, the better chance you have of getting high rankings under different keywords. The more high rankings you produce, the more free traffic you can get and the easier it will be to survive the loss of one ranking.
To check how many pages of your site are indexed in a particular search engine, simply do a search on the particular engine for "site:yourdomainname.com". Pay particular attention to Yahoo, as it often will fail to pick up many of your pages. The result of this search will tell you every page the engine has found on your site and included in its database.
If you discover only a few pages have been indexed by the search engine, you need to take a look at your site. A common problem for sites using databases concerns dynamic urls. Many programmers will write session ids and so on into the urls. The search engines have massive problems reading these urls and will often fail to include them in their databases. You have this problem if the internal pages of your site have tails like:
"yourdomainname/id43/s-876783/product=46830
If you have this problem, the best solution is to create static pages without the dynamic urls issues. The session ids and so on should be moved into the code of the page and removed from the url. You will probably need a programmer to make the fix.
If you do not have this problem, you need to figure out how to get your site into the indexes. There are plenty of articles telling you how. The first step, however, is just figuring out if the search engines have found you.
Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing firm MarketingTitan.com - a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company providing search engine optimization services. Read more Internet marketing articles.
