I have to admit that I’m addicted to search engine opimisation. I have an obsessive need to chase the changes at Google and Yahoo and waste hours mulling over the rankings of my sites. I spose in my case it can be sort of be justified – after all, about a third of my income comes directly from organic seo. Anyway, occasionally it is worth sitting back and looking at the broader picture. For example today I stumbled across Netster. Nothing special as far as search engines go however I was impressed to find that all of my websites are listed. In fact I stumbled upon them because they turned up in the back links for ezifriends. A quick search came up with the following results. Not to mention this, this or this. Then I dug a little further and realized that these results weren’t unique. In fact Netster appears to be using Googles API to access the Google database. Anyway that damped my enthusiasm for this new found search engine but motivated me enough to blog about it.
Now I’m sure by now you’re asking yourself “so what is his point?”. I guess the point is this – sometimes we become so fixed on what is directly in front of us that we forget that other options can exist. In this case of SEO, there aren’t just 2 search engines. There are hundreds if not thousands of websites that can send us traffic. You just need to tap into them. However at the same time you need to be aware that in this world of cut and paste, site scrapers, api’s, rss and datafeed it can often be hard to tell the original from the affiliates, resellers and blatant copycats. Then again, in the world of traffic generation, does that even matter?