If this topic has been covered, could someone point me at a thread please

Here's the scoop - I notice when I list on findwhat.com under a particular keyword, I also appear on about 100 other sites who appear to be grabbing the results from findwhat and displaying them under their own brand.

Can anyone give me more info on what the deal is - do any other engines feed out their links and (presumably) pay commissions on clicks? I'm not interested in the overture style searchbox gig, I'm looking to include the links on my own site.

Thanks

C!

If you have small amounts of traffic then sorry but your will be relegated to a search box in most cases if you are even that lucky.

Almost all the smaller ppc's share their databases with each other. You're right, if you list at one, you also get listed at many, many others.

What some of these ppc's don't tell you is that you don't need to open an account at every ppc, for obvious reasons.

Try some searches for under a few generic popular keywords and unfortunately, you will notice the same site listed 5 or 6 times with each referring url coming from a different ppc.

While it doesn't cost the advertiser to be listed 5 or 6 times in a row under the same keyword, I personally think they should all come clean on the database sharing and let the advertiser's know: "...If you list your site here, your site also appears on...under this keyword also..."

I personally know of a few people that have several hundred dollars in 8-10 ppc's each, all that share their databases. They could have spent part of those funds on another campaign, not to mention the fact that setting up 8-10 accounts is time-consuming.

Suggestion: Before you set up a ppc account: Ask them flat out, please provide me a list of every url that my site 'may' be listed at. You may find that there's no need to open a new account.

On the affiliate revenue sharing: I worked for a minor ppc. Unless you are bring in 5 million unique searches a month, it's tough to get out of the box.

I agree that sites should give full disclosure on where listings are going.. I have one site that routinely ends up on about 100 different URL's each time it's listed on Findwhat - that's great for traffic, but it's very poor for conversion rates. Personally I would like to choose the sites where it appears... but that's a different topic eh

C! Back to monitoring...

[Note: This message has been edited by Janet Berg]