Would searching through several Search Engines help increase traffic?

[DanielGarneau]

Would the simple fact of using a given search engine to successfully find a forum or a site contribute to increasing its visibility? Would using appropriate key words to find a site through Baidu, Yandex, and lesser known engines lead them to add my URLs to their data? Why or why not?

 

[djbaxter]

No.

 

[haqzore]

Ill add that, unfortunately, other search engines mean nothing.

Google is pretty much it.

 

[LeadCrow]

No.
SE traffic only suggests relevancy by creating a connection between search terms and links clicked on among results, but it doesnt actually guarantee it, change search result relevancy or increase a site's visibility.

unfortunately, other search engines mean nothing.

Depends. Other search engines are more popular in eurasian markets, especially china and the former eastern bloc.

Search engines dont even matter much anymore, now that massive ecosystems similar to facebook gained immense traction and internal marketing mechanics no longer depend on search engines at all. Once you're immersed into baidu's huge ecosystem, you're playing by its rules, not google or any other search engine's. And gaining visibility on those ecosystems is usually a paid service or subject to the moment's manipulated algorythm, not organic in the way users of early search engines get used to.

 

[DanielGarneau]

[...]Search engines dont even matter much anymore, now that massive ecosystems similar to facebook gained immense traction and internal marketing mechanics no longer depend on search engines at all. Once you're immersed into baidu's huge ecosystem, you're playing by its rules, not google or any other search engine's. And gaining visibility on those ecosystems is usually a paid service or subject to the moment's manipulated algorythm, not organic in the way users of early search engines get used to.

Along the same line, when searching my site through Baidu Search Engine, most results came through short summaries I had posted on LinkedIn with a link back to my site or forum.Also, from the set of tools available through Yandex Webmaster, I seem to get a better response to contents I publish on GooglePlus than to links I add directly through Yandex Webmaster tools. Chinese and Russian users are important to my niche, because I do get visitors from these countries.

 

[djbaxter]

Baidu especially, and to a lesser extent Yandex, are notoriously aggressive about spidering site. You will find lists all over the place to block these spiders but since they just keep proliferating none of them work for very long.

So you are going to get indexed by these search engines. The question is do you want to be? Are they going to help drive usable traffic to your sites? I see your sites are in a .ca domain so the answer is probably not.

 

[DanielGarneau]

Baidu especially, and to a lesser extent Yandex, are notoriously aggressive about spidering site. You will find lists all over the place to block these spiders but since they just keep proliferating none of them work for very long.

So you are going to get indexed by these search engines. The question is do you want to be? Are they going to help drive usable traffic to your sites? I see your sites are in a .ca domain so the answer is probably not.

Hello djbaxter, thank you for your input. Although my site is effectively in the .ca domain, my contents are not geographically bound. When I chose the domain, I had no technical understanding of how the domain could be interpreted by various algorithms. What I wanted was to be identified as a source from Canada. However, I was hoping that people from anywhere on the planet would be able to find my site.

A while back I was surprised to realize that the documentary Spanish language radio program I was listenng to through a short wave radio was from a radio station in China. I later learned that the Chinese people have a huge interest in learning languages. Anyhow some of my visitors are from China, others from Russia.

That leads me to want to be found by as many search engines as I possibly can wherever they are on the planet, my site being French, English and Spanish.

Any input is appreciated, thank you to all who provide it, including through related threads or posts.

 

[Denis Chandler]

Nice one, thanks!

 

[dethfire]

Google does use CTR as part of their algo, but there is no way one person can make any difference

 

[djbaxter]

Google does use CTR as part of their algo, but there is no way one person can make any difference

If that is still true, and I'm not convinced it is, we should all be able to influence ourt rankings by clicking on our own pages.

CTR generally applies to ads, not ranking.

 

[DanielGarneau]

Good post. Need to work around other good and interesting ways to make it possible. You can read other hidden facts and get ideas from this yourcompanyformations website.

Hello Frisbee, could you explain. "Other good and interesting ways to make it possible" Do you mean to make it possible to increase our visibility to search engines by using search engines for looking up our own site time and time again? Or are you talking of something else? Also, I looked up at the link you provided, and I can't see how it relates to the present thread? What is it that you wanted us to find on that site that would help advancing the discussion?

Thank you for having taken the time of responding, and the best of regards.

 

[Apple]

Yandex and Baidu are kinda bad. As someone said above, they're pretty aggressive. I found Yandex to be the worst and even argued the benefits with my fellow admins of banning Yandex which had like 40 crawlers on the site at the same time. That practice has since stopped, so it hasn't been

Putting it into perspective, when we did have a 100k+ member forum, banning China at server level (yeah, we totally did that) only affected like 2 members. We just unbanned their specific IP string. We were being bombarded by spam bots from China, maybe 200-a-day so it was a necessary evil. Even with a sign-up prevention in place, they were spamming the forum with sign-up attempts. Parts of Russia and Ukraine got the same treatment because streams of bots came from there too. lol.

Thinking about that, those two search engines are generally useless because at the end of the day, most people use Google, and maybe Bing for those few non-conformists. The rest are not important.

 

[djbaxter]

The problem with Baidu especially (Yandex to a lesser extent) is that banning IPs or even IP ranges doesn't really work for long because they keep spawning new ones. You can try banning them by user-agent but they keep changing those too.

 

[Deprecated]

Ill add that, unfortunately, other search engines mean nothing.

Google is pretty much it.

A few years ago I was deeply involved in making every possible move to make my sites as SEO friendly as possible. I use a custom CDS as my site platform which includes a search engine analytic module showing which search terms came in with visitors and how they found me. I then went back to the search engines and used those terms to see how I stood. I came up with total garbage on every site but Google.

With all the usual SEO maximizations in place and no specific SEs singled out, Google was responsible for more than 90 percent of my hits.

I came to the same conclusion as haqzore. Google isn't everything, it's the only thing.

From that day on, other than in my robots.txt file I just optimize to Google and figure the rest can like it or leave it. The rest were less than 10% of my referred traffic anyway.

 

[haqzore]

A few years ago I was deeply involved in making every possible move to make my sites as SEO friendly as possible. I use a custom CDS as my site platform which includes a search engine analytic module showing which search terms came in with visitors and how they found me. I then went back to the search engines and used those terms to see how I stood. I came up with total garbage on every site but Google.

With all the usual SEO maximizations in place and no specific SEs singled out, Google was responsible for more than 90 percent of my hits.

I came to the same conclusion as haqzore. Google isn't everything, it's the only thing.

From that day on, other than in my robots.txt file I just optimize to Google and figure the rest can like it or leave it. The rest were less than 10% of my referred traffic anyway.

I'm with you. I don't think it's a good thing that it's like that, but, it is what it is.

 

[Deprecated]

Just to add, I saw Baidu and Yandex surfing my site and apparently indexing my pages, but when I looked on their sites I couldn't even find anything from my site.

The site in mind is my cooking website. It's got recipes. I punched in all kinds of everything I could think of to get Baidu or Yandex to pop. Nothing!

Yet one of my Thai recipes (at least then, I haven't looked lately) was #3 page rank on Google. I have geo-tracking built into my custom CDS and I'm astonished that many of the visitors are from Thailand. Huh.

All I can say is that my advice is to tune your website to work with Google, and let the other search engines do what they want. If they're that bad as search engines then they won't help or hurt your traffic.

This is the same reason why Amazon is eating up all their competitors. By the way, check the stock market. It's Google, Amazon, Apple and Intel.

It's not Google's fault. It's Baidu's fault and Yandex's fault.

 

[djbaxter]

What are you on about?

Crawling does not equal indexing necessarily with any search engine. That doesn't mean a search engine is either bad or good.

The problem with Baidu and Yandex is (1) their overly aggressive spiders; and (2) the fact that essentially nobody in the western world is going to use those search engines, so at best those spiders are clogging up some of your bandwidth for no return, no benefit to you.

 

[Deprecated]

That's exactly my point. Baidu and Yandex crawled my site and it didn't do me any damned good. I'd ban them but what's the point?

Actually I do get traffic from Asia because I have a lot of Chinese and Thai recipes on my website. In fact I find it ironic that I get people in Thailand reading my Thai recipes! LOL! (And they probably found it on Google.)

I don't have anything there that will be harmed by aggressive spiders. I have probably 1000x the bandwidth I actually use. I doubt I use even 1% of my monthly allowance.

I'm like driving down the highway in my 18 wheeler and they are mosquitoes hitting my windshield.