June 13th, 2006
Top rankings – sweet dreams. Any site owner dreams to see his website on top of three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The latter operate in the same way, but have a few differences that make any website owner dream unreal.
Aaron Wall, the author of the well known SEO manual, has just released a great article where he explores all top search engines (+ Ask) in detail. It is not a secret that Google provides most traffic to any established website (Googlejuice), but its competitors improve with every passing day. Added to that, if you are an owner of a new website you are likely to be ‘sandboxed’, so it would be wise to focus on top rankings in MSN and Yahoo! you will find a deep insight into every search engine. Here comes the short version of the article (quoted). Below you will find the link to the full version of this great piece of work.
The Short Version
Yahoo!
- been in the search game for many years.
- is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
- has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program. both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
- things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!
MSN Search
- new to the search game
- is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature
- due to sucking at link analysis they place too much weight on the page content
- their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results
- likes bursty recent links
- new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN Search
- things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search
- has been in the search game a long time, and saw the web graph when it is much cleaner than the current web graph
- is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link
- looks for natural link growth over time
- heavily biases search results toward informational resources
- trusts old sites way too much
- a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations
- they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content
- if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for that term. on page variation and link anchor text variation are important. a page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier
- crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.
- things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost
Ask
- looks at topical communities
- due to their heavy emphasis on topical communities they are slow to rank sites until they are heavily cited from within their topical community
- due to their limited market share they probably are not worth paying much attention to unless you are in a vertical where they have a strong brand that drives significant search traffic
Summary: the article is no doubt a good and up-to-date manual for all website owners – what you should take into account targeting top rankings in this or that search engine. I think every individual will discover new facts and SEO tips about search engines.
[tags]search engines, google, msn, yahoo, guaranteed top rankings, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing[/tags]
GBuy (Google online payment processing service), direct PayPal competitor, is to be released on June 28. The entire process works much the same as of PayPal: the buyers will be taken off the merchant’s site to complete the transaction. Google will collect payment information and in the future will provide improved personalized search results for that particular individual. Added to that in the search results the top search engine plans to designate each merchant accepting GBuy as a “trusted GBuy merchant.”
