Dogpile, the meta search engine, recently did a simple study on three search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. They could not include MSN Search since it is still new to the search space. What they found was that with a sample of 10,000 queries 86% of the time they had a different #1 result on each website and 32% of these queries did not produce any overlapping results in top three positions. In another finding they found that just 3% of all paid and algorithmic results were shared by all three search engines.
What does this mean for your search engine strategy?
There is absolutely no way you can effectively optimize your website for all search engines or even for top five. Since each search engine uses a different algorithm and keeps changing it frequently, you simply can not make sure that all search engines will always like your website. In fact, in our research, we found that techniques that can get you top rankings in MSN may actually get you banned in Yahoo. Similarly, what Google loves, Yahoo hates them. So it is highly unlikely that you will be at the top in all search engines. And if someone is promising you that, you better make sure that you check what they plan to do because they might very well be using some unacceptable practices that might get you banned.
How should you optimize your website for search engines?
Actually, we believe that apart from using standard web design practices, there is no need to do any optimization as such. During recent months, Google has actually started to penalize highly optimized websites since the so-called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms were not really optimizing the websites - they were essentially trying to track Google's algorithm and cheat the system.
So how can you make sure that search engines like your website?
Our research shows that if your readers like your website, search engines will love it. Of course, you can make it easy for search engines by properly naming your pages, putting links to relevant pages with more information, and providing headings and sub-headings for readers to find relevant information easily. Other than that, there is not much to do. If your readers love your website, they will put links to you, add your website to your favorites, and tell their friends about you.
If you had to pick one website to optimize for, which one would that be?
This is a tricky question because while both Google and MSN are expected to lead the search business in the future, if you do rank well in Yahoo right now (or other smaller search engines), you might want to stick with the one that ranks you the best. But remember that Yahoo has no clear strategy on how it ranks websites and spammers do easily hijack Yahoo. Google and MSN, on the other hand, have clear guidelines on what you can do to make it easy for their spiders to index your websites.
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Technorati tag: Search engine optimization