There are approximately 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide, of whom 50% use search engines every day. Google, Yahoo! and MSN currently account for over 90% of all these searches, being by far and away the three most popular search engines in the English speaking world, (the Chinese language search engine Baidu actually ranks third in terms of numbers of users and searches overall).
Of these big hitters Google is the massively dominant force, the biggest operation in the market by a long way. According to the latest search metrics from comScore, 63% of searches conducted in the USA during August were made using Google, up from 61.9% in July and 56.5% in August 2007.
Despite Yahoo! being the second most visited website in the U.S., and the most visited website in the world it's share of the search market slipped to 19.6% from 20.5% in July and from 23.3% a year earlier. Microsoft's share fell to 8.3%, down from 8.9% in July and 11.3% last year.
Though Google, Yahoo! and MSN are all essentially seeking to achieve the same thing - to provide maximum relevance search return to their users - using similar concepts and technology they all apply their own unique techniques and philosophies. Clearly Google's approach has struck a cord with web users. Not only did Google achieve critical acclaim when it first appeared on the search scene for its clean layout and the efficacy of its search algorithms, it also achieved a critical user mass. Mass adoption continued it's own momentum through word of mouth recommendation and referral. What started off as a college project a decade ago has resulted almost unbelievably in the creation of what is now one of the world's most successful companies. Google's recent acquisition of Youtube, Blogspot/Blogger and Feedburner has expanded its already extensive user reach and fan base.
WPP-owned research company Millward Brown reports that a combination of brand recognition and financial performance gave Google the top spot in a list of global brands. New research estimates its value to be $86bn (£43bn), a 30% year-on-year increase.
A dilemma for search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals is reconciling the optimisation necessary for a site or web page to appear towards the top of the search results on different search engines against the fact that each engine uses their own unique algorithms and definitions of relevance. It's a global approach and inevitably there is a pay-off between trying to curry favour with the biggest player in the market (Google) and other, smaller but no less relevant search engines.
There are those of the view that if you target all three you'll end up failing with all three. Others are of the opinion that if you target only one (either Google, or MSN or Yahoo!), you can apply a tight focus to generate predictable and successful rankings. People sometimes put the choice down to domain age - a 2-year-old domain focusing on Google with a 1 year or younger domain best for MSN and Yahoo!.
SEOmoz.org report the following ten factors as having the most effect on Google's ranking algorithm:
- Keyword use in title tag
- Anchor text of inbound link
- Global link popularity of site
- Age of site
- Link popularity within the site's internal link structure
- Topical relevance of inbound links to site
- Link popularity of site in topical community
- Keyword use in body text
- Global link popularity of linking site
- Topical relationship of linking page
Whilst Google's market dominance might make it a temptation to take these SEOmoz.org factors onboard wholesale, it would be wise to also consider and compare some of the main optimisation issues of the other major engines.
Whilst the algorithms are jealously guarded and highly secret, there are some trends and general patterns that can shed at least a little light on how Google, Yahoo! and MSN differ in ranking results for natural listings:
Yahoo!
- Text processing query matching.
- Generally considered better than MSN but inferior to Google in determining if a link is natural or not.
- Pretty good at crawling sites deeply so long as they have sufficient link popularity to get all their pages indexed.
- Has huge amounts of internal content and a paid inclusion program, both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results. In this context paid inclusion might be legitimately regarded as a component of organic optimisation drawing a bias.
- On the flip side of that is that if you are trying to rank for highly spammed keyword phrases the top 5 or so results may be editorially selected.
- Off topic reciprocal links may still yield dividends
MSN Search
- Relatively new to search.
- Weak at determining the natural or artificial nature of a link.
- Place a great deal of weight on the page content.
- Their poor relevancy algorithms are claimed to cause a heavy bias toward commercial results.
- Likes bursty recent links.
- MSN is considered inferior to Yahoo! or Google at crawling deeply through large sites.
- Will generally rank new sites faster than other systems that regard them as un-trusted.
- Off-topic reciprocal links can yield results in MSN Search.
- Concept processing query matching.
- Best at determining link authenticity.
- Looks for natural link growth over time.
- Search results biased toward informational resources.
- May trusts old sites too much.
- Has aggressive duplicate content filters.
- If a page is obviously focused on a term Google may filter the document out for that term.
- On-page variation and link anchor text variation are important.
- Crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality.
- Off-topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective and may even result in penalisation.
At SEO Consult, our experience and expertise means that we understand the subtleties and nuance of different engines' behaviour. Depending on the specific business objectives of individual client campaigns, we can advise and act accordingly.
Visit www.seo-mama.com
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