First Hungarian SEO Contest

Just for the record: The first Hungarian Search Engine Competition was announced a week ago. Webmasters are challenged to rank #1 on Google by the end of this year. The chosen keyword is an imaginary or nonsense Hungarian word: "pillangószív" (butterflyheart).

Currently 203000 results are displayed by Google: Inspite of the fact that no real prize has been offered, quite a lot of webmasters went in for this competition.

The announcement (in Hungarian) can be found here:
http://kereso.blog.hu/2006/07/19/keresooptimalizalo_verseny_2006

How Much Does a Domain like google.hu Worth?

During the las few years Google let domainsquatters make money from pages like google.by, google.cz, google.hu. Now that they finally acquired google.hu, one might think about how much profit a measure like this can generate? Is it enough to pay the attorneys? This post attempts to answer this question:

Users who typed in this address during the last three years, used to land at this page:


Instead of this:

As you can see, the page where google.hu was redirected (kurzor.hu) was not deceptive at all, (unlike google.by) so you might think that for the majority of the visitors it was obvious that they arrived at the wrong page. Curiously enough it was not clear for everybody, some folks were sure that they used Google when they in fact used a worse search engine developed by a Hungarian company:

Not only comments appearing on my site –where I wrote about what google.hu really was– were clear evidence of this misbelief, but also the large number of results when you searched for google.hu. Google shows 389000 results for "google.hu" while 902000 results for "google.co.hu" and Yahoo! displays 1130 inbound links for google.hu

These facts may help us to determine the value of this domain name, but luckily enough we can get more accurate data too, since kurzor.hu is monitored by webaudit.hu where you can get detailed information about the number of unique visitors, number of visits, and page impressions. These data (this Wednesday –first entire day without the redirection– compared to last Wednesday's traffic) show that the due to the lack of this redirect the site lost approximately

• 38000 unique daily visitors (-66%)
  
• 55000 daily visits (-58%)
  
• 244000 daily page impressions (-54%)
  

Most likely anyone could monetize this traffic easily and cover the expenses of the legal procedure of claiming a domain name like google.hu...

Proliferation of Web 2.0 clones? - del.icio.hu, digg.hu

As I complained earlier: mainstream Web 2.0 developers just don't care about international users. This gives opportunity for the local developers in non-English speaking countries as the following list illustrates:

digg.hu aka linkter.hu

linkter.hu (means "linkspace" and digg.hu redirects to linkter.hu) is tightly integrated into and has similar design to the first real Hungarian Web 2.0 site: blogter.hu (a blog farm organized by strong editorial control on its home page) The site runs a proprietary engine, and due to a massive online and offline campaign of blogter.hu, most likely it will establish a solid user base to provide Hungarian users with fresh links.

del.icio.hu

del.icio.hu is in alpha stage since the end of March, but the site just doesn't look promising. This site also sports a proprietary engine, and its owners were to develop quite a few extra features compared to del.icio.us. Maybe that's the reason why they failed to launch a feature complete site so far?

internetmedia.hu

internetmedia.hu: This digg clone has started in March just as digg.hu, but it is based on an open source CMS: pligg. Due to lack of a marketing campaign, chances are high that this page will not be able to build a thriving community.

book.mark.hu

book.mark.hu was launched in July and developed by the same developer as the above mentioned internetmedia.hu and based on the same concept too: Take an open source CMS (this time scuttle), translate it and start a new site on a domain name you already have. All in all this site has more chance to succeed, since its competition is quite weak right now.

Google Inc. acquires google.hu

Google Inc. finally managed (or simply decided?) to comission patent and trade mark attorneys to acquire google.hu. As I wrote earlier in my previous post (About www.google.hu) the domain name was used by a local company, so the address redirected to their own search engine. Since this search engine is not tied to any bigger portal, its traffic most likely will much less than the current average of one million monthly visits. The previous owner of this domain name announced yesterday that the domain had been transferred to Google Inc. based on an agreement signed on July 7th. The DNS servers have been updated to point to Google's server today.

Interestingly enough google.hu now redirects to google.com, instead of redirecting to google.co.hu, or serving the pages from this newly attained domain name.

Update: I have just noticed that the situation is somewhat similar in Czech Republic: perhaps google.cz will be the next target? (More info here...)