listings sites vs affiliate sites in google se listings

**purple** · 23-01-05

I have noticed lots of search engine listings on google are from websites just containing basically search listings. Some of them have scraped of sites and done 302 refresh.

What are peoples views on sites which are basically a search listing,site using espot feeds etc and should they get a better listing than a site which offers visitors some content and then diverts them to selected affiliate links.

**pricethat** · 23-01-05

I personally rely on the fact that google find previous search results on my site. If you imagine a search enginehas very little content, so if you were searching for a keyword of "car" for example you wouldnt find the site that could give you these results because the page does not exist until someone searches for it.

What a lot of sites do is cache the results and make that page spiderable to people like google etc. These pages because they contain only results for "cars" are very keyword rich and as such would normally outrank good seo sites about cars because the content is deemed relevant.

As for the question, should they be allowed etc, its just a method of marketing, you could ask the same question about leaflet dropping, direct mail or telecanvassing, its just a method of attracting traffic to your site.

This is only my opinion but its worth considering, i believe that a page on my site for "candle" for example, is much more relevant to a user than a simple affiliate page recommending one or two merchants for candles, as the user can see all candles from a lot of merchants without bias. There is a lot of them and more than i have seen on any affiliate site.

Of course there is arguments for an against and personally i hate getting either affiliate or search engine results when i search for something. But i also need to make money like the rest of the world. ;-P

**SillyJokes** · 23-01-05

Those pages are a tiresome pain in the side of anybody who is doing a search. They should be dropped by the SE and the sooner the better - they are a disgusting development, add nothing to the user experience and I hate them with a passion.

**lowndsy** · 23-01-05

Depends on how relevant those search results are. I hate it when I am searching for something like care in the community and I get car, com and nit, and espotting/overture results are just plain obscure sometimes, but sometimes you get a page of truly relevant results which is great and saves me loads of time.

**Mogga** · 23-01-05

Why would I use search engine A to go to a page on search engine B to find the sites I want?

**pricethat** · 24-01-05

Its true they are an annoyance and do fill up the web with duplicate results that you may have found with just using google to begin with if they were not there. But like i said i am guilty of the same thing so i can understand why it is done as much as anything, but when you look at it reasonably, its only the same as affiliate sites. They are the same thing, people construct them deliberately to attract traffic to that site for a specific keyword or product. Effectively affiliate sites are a middle man, an obstruction to what could already be found using google if there was not so many damn affiliate sites.

The only real difference is these people are targetting a lot more keywords than generally an affiliate would.

To answer the poster above though with the "why would anyone want to use search engine Amto then get to search engine B, it really depends on the search engine eh?

For example, i really do think the results in my search results for "handbags" (for example) are much much more relevant and of more benefit to then end user than the results from google. Dont forget in the most part google applies relevance to the results in its database, so the chances are that the search results that it is listing is because they are of relevance to the end user. If the search engine was just for cars, would you say that the relevance of the results would be better on google or the one dedicated to cars? Google and others are just showing the most relevant of what they have in their databases by standards they make. Not the sites that you complain about.

The person above that says they are of no use and should be banned has completely overlooked the fact that it is google that are listing them, not the search engines listing themselves!! So any real hatred for the fact that they exist should be directed at google eh? It is after all google that decides that these search results are relevant to the end user.

**harris1** · 25-01-05

Personally I go back as soon as I get a site recycling search. But some of the meta sites that are now showing up actually offer some pretty good results. I can see being of benefit to many searchers especially the inexperienced.

If you actually look at some of the sites with decent backfill they can provide more relevant results than some proper search engines.

The new Msn beta for example is so bad its unusable, I have seen some search portals that certainly offer more relavant results and a better user experience.

Strange but true.

**pricethat** · 25-01-05

I think to be honest that there is a bit of a growth with pure meta search engines, with the big boys they seem to have moved away from meta as a sole source of data as its very open to duping or spam.

Because of this there is no real point in making spammy pages so much as they just wont rank in the main pages (ie stuff keywords for card in the meta tags and then show porn)

But because there is less spam in meta results compared with maybe a few years ago these meta engines are actually becoming quite relevant again as its human beings telling the engines what the pages are about. Not bots that determine what the keywords are for the page.

On the whole its only experienced users of the net that find them annoying, mainly because they know that in an idealistic world they wont be there. To the majority of the internet users they are just as valuable as the search results themselves.