Comments on: Answers Buys $100M Dictionary. Really.

By: SEO Service Provider » Answers.com, Good Deal Or Not, Seems To Be SEO Unaware (Or Am I Missing Something?)

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 03:04:03 +0000

[...] Answers.com, Good Deal Or Not, Seems To Be SEO Unaware (Or Am I Missing Something?) Filed under: SEO Myths and Facts — Allen July 18, 2007 @ 3:03 am (Source) I’m all for defensible traffic, but I just don’t get the reasoning here. Sure, you don’t want to mortgage your online future, but how is acquiring a company with a significant proportion of their traffic coming from search going to reduce your reliance on search engines? [...]

By: shor

shor — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 07:30:12 +0000

I guess you could say the acquisition reduces the Answerz group’s reliance on volatile search traffic.

85% of dictionary.com’s traffic comes from direct type-in/bookmarking or people searching for the exact term ‘dictionary’.

This domain-to-keyword-based search traffic and direct type-in traffic is highly defensible in the current world of SEO – a lot more so than Answerz competing with the likes of Wikipedia for long tail search referrals.

By: Nathan Weinberg

Nathan Weinberg — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 06:29:04 +0000

I’m guessing they mean reduce their reliance on search engine marketing and advertising. If Dictionary.com is getting all that traffic, they spend less on ads, and the money saved will contribute to making the acquisition worth the price.

By: Jaan Kanellis

Jaan Kanellis — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:44:32 +0000

I assume the dictionary.com property gets a ton of traffic from “keyword” definition to. I know I spot them all of the time for this.