Putting your eggs in one basket?

• Apr. 10, 2003

Since Easter is right around the corner, I thought now would be a good time to talk about eggs and baskets.  Not Easter eggs though.

We’ve touched on this subject before time and time again.  Many times a website or SEO tends to focus its web placement efforts in one spot only, while ignoring the rest of the web.  Some owners or SEO's say Overture is the only way to go, whereas others figure Google is their best bet.

Currently, this may be true.  But consider the future.  Even six months from now the search engine landscape can be drastically different.  We know that Yahoo! is raising money and is looking at buying something – probably a PPC engine – likely Overture.  Although they wouldn’t likely cut off Overture’s other clients, you can almost bet there will be a shift in the strategy of Overture if this happens.

Also consider that back in December Yahoo! purchased Inktomi.  So you can almost bet that sometime in the near future, likely within the six month timeframe, Yahoo! will either drop Google results altogether, or incorporate their own Inktomi results with Google.

Now, let’s consider MSN.  MSN has already announced that they are getting into the search game by developing their own brand of search.  Currently, they use Overture, Looksmart and Inktomi.  Although I don’t see them developing any relevant search engine within six months, I can see them having their own offerings of PPC, and traditional search within a year.  Therefore Overture and Inktomi could see their partnership with MSN finished.

Now, let’s consider the market share of these three portals:  Yahoo! still has the largest base of regular users.  If we focus our efforts on Google, and achieve top 10 rankings there, we also get top 10 in Yahoo!.  That’s great for now.  But what if they decide to roll out the Inktomi results instead?  If you haven’t previously paid for the inclusion, or directory listing, there’s a good chance that your top 10 in Yahoo! will be gone, along with a substantial chunk of your traffic.

Now, I know what you’re saying – “Yeah, but I pay for Overture PPC and get tons of traffic.”  This is probably true, for now.  Currently Overture’s largest partner, as far as revenue is concerned is MSN.  Therefore you’re likely getting a large part of your Overture traffic from MSN.  But what happens when MSN develops their own PPC engine?  Do you think they will keep Overture?  Overture recently announced that MSN provides about 1/3 of their revenue.  That means if MSN drops Overture, there’s a good chance that 1/3 of your traffic will also drop, if you focus on PPC.

Now for those of you who have read through this and said “Whew, I’m safe cause I only do Google.”  I would hope, after reading this article, that you are rethinking your strategy.    I’ve already shown above what happens when (and not if) Yahoo! drops Google for Inktomi, well other things could happen as well.  Remember that Google is number two right now, but what happens when MSN develops their search?  As you probably already know, when Microsoft decides to throw a bunch of money at a problem, it goes away.  In other words, if they take the search business seriously enough (which I’d say they do, because they increased their search staff from 70 to 200) then they could develop a really good engine which performs better than most, if not all (including Google).

It could happen where they start winning users away from Google, and if your not prepared for that, your traffic will fall.

Now, I'm not trying to scare you with all my doom and gloom, I'm just trying to illustrate the point that you can't put all your eggs in one basket.  You have to diversify your SEO portfolio in order to weather the storm of changes which are inevitable.  I didn't even touch on the fact that Alltheweb and Altavista should be gaining ground because they were both recently bought by Overture which has big plans for both.  And I didn't bring up anything about Askjeeves/Teoma, who is also still holding their own and seems to be gaining in popularity (remember that Teoma does a great job of crawling and indexing the web, and determining relevant relationships something like Google).  Nor did I mention Looksmart PPC which also have been growing lately as well, or their plans to crawl the web daily.  All of these engines should be weighed when you make your final decision as to where you're going to invest your SEO money as they may now, or in the future, have a big impact on what you get back from your site.

Rob Sullivan
Production Supervisor
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
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