A couple of holiday property websites have come to my attention recently – one we were contacted by, the other I received a ‘newsletter’ (Spam?). In both cases the lack of attention to exactly where the paying visitors would come from was startling. They’re both advertising only websites pushing to expand their portfolio with free or heavily discounted advertising, but they have virtually ZERO incoming links and I imagine zero traffic as a result. As it stands any paying advertisers will be unlikely to repeat their subscription.
The latter (I’m consciously holding back here as they are my competition after all) had a really great looking website, they’d obviously put a lot of effort into it. I wish them luck but this is a bit like building a luxury 5 star hotel on the moon and waiting for the guests to roll in. With a total of 6 internal and external links registered in google nobody will find it!
I talked this through in depth with the first company who were at pains to point out how impressive the site would be (it was having technical problems at the time) but despite my best attempts they appeared to not grasp the point that impressive counts for very little if nobody can find it. Actually this is not the full picture as they did have offline marketing in place, so all is not completely lost, just an online opportunity seriously missed.
I’m amazed that people are still throwing so much misplaced money into the Internet without the basic fundamentals in place.
cuil
the new search engine cuil has launched the mixed reviews. It’s been ‘noticed’ because it has some high flyers from Google, Altavista and IBM involved but I’m not sure it deserves the attention.
The search results are visually difficult to read, as they are spread over two to three columns. The pictures provided with the results appear wrong (at least they did with selfcateringhols) and as for the results? We didn’t fair too well so they’re obviously to be questioned!
On the plus the contextual menu seems to add value when searching on a fairly specific theme. When searching for Barceleona apartments for instance I was offered links on the neighbourhoods of Barcelona, Antoni Gaudi and Modernism and a couple of other relevant links – although oddly enough the last link was to towns in Colombia.
When searching on a more general search (self catering holidays) the contextual menu focussed on specific geographical locations of the UK (Cornwall and Scotland), which is fine if that’s where you want to go but otherwise limited.
The most noise about the launch concerns not the search engine, the page layout or the results returned but the fact that it does not collect user data at all. This is an interesting point as Google’s system is clearly not popular in this respect, so any half decent search engine that adopts a similar privacy policy to cuil may well find itself with an automatic audience. I’m not convinced though that the offerings here are good enough to hold any potential new audience.