Online classifieds

It’s cool that Find It, the online classifieds site we are building to provide newsagents with an online connection, has been listed in the top 60 Australian Web 2.0 applications. This blog post from Ross Dawson has the background. The Top 60 list is here.

Yeah, we’re proud as punch about this. It’s recognition from people who know their Web 2.0 stuff. It recognises the effort of an online start up and encourages is to push forward.

Now if only newsagents would understand the importance of this online stuff to their business.

Our Find It online classifieds site now has 14,000 online classified ads including 162 current Garage Sales and 8,500 vehicles for sale. Visits and pageviews for Find It continue to grow with Google and Yahoo pushing the site further up in their rankings. All newsagent ads including business listings, employment ads and products for sale are free.

Facebook, the poplar social media site, is offering fre classifieds according to this report from Editor and Publisher. It’s a clever move on their part – tapping into an established and active user community.

In a related story, Microsoft has announced that it has taken a stake in CareerBuilder, the U.S.’s largest online job site. CareerBuilder is owned by publishers Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy.

Check out page 4 of the April 2007 job ad survey from ANZ economists. On Page 4 they graph the weekly average number of ads in newspapers versus online. Newspapers are flat and online is showing excellent growth. It’s sobering stuff for any business relying on newspapers to drive revenue and or customer traffic.

Newspaper publishers have been grumpy recently at the ANF over their job ads reports.

A week ago days ago I blogged that our Find It online classifieds site had passed 12,000 ads. Last night we hit 13,223 ads. Even though we remain tiny compared to everyone else, every step forward improves opportunity for newsagents to have a part of the online marketplace.

Five days ago I blogged that our Find It online classifieds site had passed 11,000 ads. Last night we passed 12,000 ads. Even though we remain tiny compared to everyone else in this space, every step forward improves our relevance and extends the opportunity for newsagents to have a part of the online marketplace.

Our Find It online classified site shot past 11,000 ads overnight. There are currently 11,054 ads. Slowly but surely we’re building content. The 11,000 is significant given that each day ads are deleted or expire as well. Our garage sales are a hit growing from 30 or so two weeks ago to over 101 now.

Jobs.com.au hit our TV screens a few months ago with a loud colourful ad promoting its new employment website. After spending what I suspect is a million or two on TV and outdoor media I read in today’s Australian Financial Review (p20) that administrators have been appointed. It was always going to be tough for jobs.com.au as they were playing in a crowded marketplace with some very successful operators, especially Seek. Jobs’ mistake was that they did not offer a point of difference, they brought online an expensive offline model.

What’s this got to do with newsagents? Our Find It online classifieds model is close to coming out of beta. Unlike Jobs, we’re horizontal, mainly free and providing a point of difference to traditional classifieds. Our retail partners are newsagents and here is the rub. Most newsagents are not engaging with us. Few have loaded their free business ad. Fewer have promoted the site. So, the T intersection I face requires a choice – to continue to develop Find It to provide, in part, a revenue stream for newsagents, or to ignore them and develop without them. Based on the 11,000 ads so far, newsagents are not crucial to the model. In the next two weeks I will decide which turn at the T intersection we will take.

That Find It has 11,000 ads and is growing pageviews daily is healthy for us.

Our Find It online classifieds site passed 10,000 live ads overnight. While 10,000 is small compared to sites from PBL, Fairfax, News, Telstra and eBay, it’s a great milestone because it has been achieved without a multi million dollar ad campaign.

Part of the Find It mission is to provide newsagents with access to revenue from online advertising. We are the only online classifieds site offering this to newsagents.

Click for commitment was a good story in The Age yesterday about online dating. The sidebar story, while listing various online dating sites at the end, was a pitch for Fairfax’s RSVP. Even thought our 3loves is tiny I would have thought it deserved a mention since it was targeted in a campaign designed to drive traffic for RSVP. But then we’re free and they are not. We’re trying to build something of value for newsagents and they are not.

Google in the US is about to get 500,000 real estate listings thanks to a deal with Realogy Corp., owner of the Century 21 and some other real-estate brokers. The BusinessWeek report says 58% of all searches for “real estate” are done on Google. Trulia is also to benefit from these listings. See the press release here.

Across at our Find It online classifieds business we have introduced fast ads – advertisers can create an ad in seconds. We’ve done this based on feedbck from newsagents and others using the site.

My blog post yesterday about how an affiliate marketing campaign run by Fairfax Digital chasing traffic for their RSVP site caused a stir.

Crikey.com.au picked up the story for their daily email bulletin and their website.

It was fascinating watching the quick disassembling of the RSVP affiliate campaign. It’s not easy and during the day one could see the retreat. The Google cache remains the only live online evidence I suspect that other affiliate campaigns purchased by Fairfax Digital were disassembled too as a result of our outing this affiliate marketing practice by Fairfax.

I received several calls including one from the CEO of Commission Monster. He said that what I reported was the action of a rogue affiliate, possible someone looking to commercially harm Commission Monster, and that as soon as they discovered this they took the campaign down. I don’t know if it was the action of a rogue affiliate and frankly I don’t care. Given the thousands of dollars Fairfax would have running in its RSVP affiliate campaigns with Commission Monster, both companies ought to know when a ‘rogue affiliate’ is at work or not. If they were concerned about such things they would have checks and balances in place to ensure that the scam I outed yesterday did not continue beyond a day. That it was running for at least two months demonstrates to the cynic in me that they were happy to turn a blind eye.

I suspect that RSVP suffers from a significant churn – hence the need for even dubious campaigns such as affiliate campaigns. Fairfax would know something about churns from their newspaper experience. They would also know about the need to engage in practices acceptable to the Audit Bureau. The scams used in some affiliate marketing campaigns ought to be enough to scare off any respectable company regardless of the new traffic generated.

It will be interesting to see how this issue plays out and whether I hear anything from Fairfax Digital.

Fairfax Digital, the owner of RSVP, the biggest online dating site in Australia, seems to be using dubious SEO tactics to manipulate Google search results to attract more traffic to its site.

Using Hitwise data we can see that RSVP attracted, on average, 3.3 million visits a month over December 2006 and January 2007. Our 3loves site attracted on average 49,778 visits a month over the same two months while all online dating sites attracted on average 20.79 million visits a month. RSVP has 15.8% share of traffic in the online dating category. We have 1.5% of RSVPs traffic.

These stats make the RSVP behaviour all the more curious. Here’s what we know so far.

Fairfax Digital uses an organisation called Commission Monster to promote RSVP and, we suspect, other Fairfax Digital sites. We discovered this by tracking redirection from a Google search results link through to where we actually ended up. We were taken through Commission Monster on the way to the page we were seeking through Google.

Someone, we suspect Commission Monster, has created a page which redirects traffic to RSVP when they have been searching for 3LOVES. This is a violation of Google rules. Click here to see what Google thinks is at the page. This is what the Google spider cached on January 30 this year. Curiously, the page has been modified in the last 24 hours, since we first raised this issue, and is now displaying an error.

Until yesterday, the page seemed to check where the click came from and if it was not Google, the browser redirected to RSVP. We know from Google results and what’s in their cache that the Google spider was not redirected.

Here is the Google cache for the page as captured by us today. This is evidence of misbehavior. Fairfax / RSVP actions over the last 24 hours show they know they have been caught out. Expect the Google cached page to change as they try and remove traces of their Google search results manipulation.

That Fairfax and or their representatives have changed the redirect page in the last 24 hours is proof to us that they know they have done something wrong.

Even though it does not actually exist. Browsers clicking on the Google search results are taken through what is called a 302 redirect to RSVP. Whoever set this up did so to take people searching for 3LOVES to RSVP.

Whoever has done this has gone to considerable lengths to try and trick the Google spider. BMW did something similar and were removed from Google for a time as a result. Details of what BMW did and the consequences can be read here. Google gave BMW a pagerank 0 penalty, meaning that they lose all relevancy in Google searches. It’s kind of like being sent to Siberia in Winter for a while. Google takes attempts to manipulate search results very seriously as the purity of results is crucial to their credibility and business model.

We know from our research that Fairfax Digital is not only targeting our 3LOVES site in this way. We have plenty of other dating site names being used to drive traffic to RSVP in this way. Here is the cached page setup for Adultmatchmaker.

We have reported the matter to Google. They came back to us quickly and have sought additional information which we are providing.

Google’s webmaster guidelines cover this issue. Specifically, Google advises webmasters: Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects. They go on to say: If a site doesn’t meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. This is why we are putting it to Google that RSVP is removed from the Google index.

3LOVES is a tiny free online dating site. We’re new, we’re under-resourced and we are filling a need in the community. People are spending too much chasing love online. Tens of millions of dollars are spent each year by Australians chasing love and romance online. If we can save even a fraction o that for people to use elsewhere in their lives than our mission will be accomplished.

The folks at Fairfax Digital and RSVP ought to get a grip and focus on their offering rather than try and con people searching for us into visiting their RSVP site.

3loves is part of an online classifieds offering we are launching with newsagents as our retail partners.

Do a Google search for our startup free online dating site, 3loves, and this comes up in the results.

If you click on the link it takes you to RSVP. This is very clever Search Engine Optimisation by Fairfax Digital, the owners of RSVP and reflects a manipulation of Google search results. In the bricks and mortar world this could be considered passing off your product as something else to get a prospect interested.

I don’t know why Fairfax would go to so much trouble, we are barely an ant to their gigantic online dating site. Maybe it has something to do with RSVP costing around $30 a month for members to do what they can do at 3loves for free. Whatever the reason, Fairfax ought to stop manipulating Google search results as it’s scams like this which will lead to distrust.

People using Google and other search engines need to be able to trust search results and games like those played by Fairfax dilute that trust. Someone searching for 3loves wants to find entries which refer to 3loves, not entries created solely to siphon this traffic off to a website which has no relationship at all with 3loves.

There are enough scammers in the online dating world already. I wold have thought Fairfax too successful to engage in these games.

3loves is a social media site launched to support our Find It online classifieds business – a online model we are launching with newsagents.

Here’s the poster for a university campaign we launch for our online classified site, Find It, this week.

We’re looking to connect with people who would use eBay – the Find It pitch is that we’re free. Even when we do charge our prices will be a fraction of the eBay fees and Find It profits stay in Australia.

Newsagents can sign up for free to partner with Find It nd therefore access profit share.

We’ve received welcome coverage from Sandra Hanchard at Hitwise, the respected web traffic measurement company, on the impact sites like Find It is having on mainstream classified sites:

While the top 10 Classifieds websites accounted for 83.1% for the week ending 21 January 2006, they now comprise 75.3% for the week ending 20 January 2007. The decline of 7.8% in combined market share for the top 10 players means we’re seeing a more competitive industry. This is a trend for the major classifieds to keep an eye on.

Read the whole post here.

Newsagents, through over the counter grass roots efforts, are helping build Find It traffic and local community relevance – especially for our free community classifieds.

Go to Yahoo, type in newsagency and click search. Number 5 out of 191,000 entries found is the Beechworth Newsagency ad at Find It. Vaughan Lawrence placed the free business directory ad a couple of months ago and now it’s ranked 5 out of 191,000. Any newsagent or any business for that matter can have a similar free business directory entry including photos. This ad has been viewed 362 times. Some of these views will be from people who had never heard of his business. It amazes me that more newsagents are not taking up the opportunity of free online ads at Find It.