After the Winners in the German Googleindex for 2009, we now get to the list of those who are the biggest losers of 2009, according to the SISTRIX Visibilityindex. Just as with the winning list, I will try to note trends that become apparent in the list and give a short explanation of possible causes.

Domainmoves- and Closures
Besides a few moves – like the move from premiere.de to sky.de or download.com to download.cnet.com, for example – this list contains a remarkable amount of domains that took a majority of their content offline. A few of them have already warranted their own posting in this blog over the last year: a part of Internet-history got carried to its grave when Geocities.com, one of the first and largest online freehosters, closed its doors. The Meyers.de dictionary, as well as the majority of the Brockhaus disappeared from the index. The last few weeks has seen the move from the question and answer subdomain (“iq.lycos.de”) to a new domain, which means that Lycos.de has become nearly invisible in the index since the mainpage content (“www.lycos.de”) was moved to a new domain before.

Yellow Pages
The large amount of yellow-pages, phone-directories and similar projects on this list is surely another noticeable trend. Besides such rather obvious Google Penalties like those for flix.de or lokal.ws for example, I am intrigued by the development of dialo.de: founded in 2006, purchased already by a phone-book-publishing-house in 2007, the site has continuously lost ground. It seems that they have completely sunk to insignificance in 2009. Not only is their presence within Google nearly impossible to measure, even traffic-indicators like Alexa and Google Trends are unable to detect any life on the domain. It is unknown if they have prematurely capitulated to the Google Yellow-Page-integration via Universal Search or if they were unable to conceive a way to get users to visit the page. I would not be surprised if the remaining sites in this sector will have a hard year ahead of them – Google does not only want to be a searchengine, but wants to neutralize as many stopovers between searchquery and searchresult. And phone- as well as yellow-pages belong to these stopover, too.

It is rather uncommon for a domain to show up in this list two years in a row: vanityfair.de managed to do this though. After losing many interesting rankings in 2008, they managed to make another noticeable step backwards around mid-2009 – maybe it would be better to close down the page altogether. Kijiji had to transfer a large chunk of their content on to the kleinanzeigen.ebay.de subdomain – a decision that has not really paid off from a SEO-point-of-view, but let's see how this will unfold. CMA.de (“Bestes vom Bauern”) was successful in having nearly all of their content disappear from the index: after the domain could be found in the top-10 for a number of food-related keywords (“lammfleisch”, “rezepte”, “gulasch”) at the end of last year, it seems that a relaunch made the site only show up for queries for “CMA” - but this should not be a problem anymore after the decision to close its doors.