Search Engine Wars

When people search for something they only care about two things, the response time and the relevancy of the result. Looks like Google or Yahoo is superior to Microsofts Live.com in terms of search technology.

I would believe to some extend it explains why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo to battle with Google in the search market.

The different technologies used by the search engines can sometimes cause SEO professionals a bit of a headache, as they have to use different techniques for the the different listings. What you find these days is that most people optimise their sites for Google, because it holds the market share for search.

In short, lets take a look at just how the Search Engines take an interest in your site:

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

Google (take a deep breath!)

• has been in the search game a long time
• 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 (Jeeves, remember him?)

• 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

Basically, content is king - no let me rephrase that - Quality content is king. There is very little doubt about that. The relevance of the content on your site plays a big part in how all the search engines rank it, especially Google. And lets face it, with Google hogging the majority share of the search engine market, its Google where we want our listings to appear - right?