For many people the terms “Google” and “Search Engine” are synonymous. And with good reason. According to a report dated January 5, 2009 at hitslink.com, Google now accounts for 81.26% of all searches. Wow!
Yahoo distantly follows with 10.43%, MSN with 2.96% and AOL with 1.96%. Microsoft Live, Ask, Altavista, Excite, Lycos and All the Web round out the Top 10 (see the chart below).
Interestingly, on several of my websites MSN provides disproportionately more traffic than the hitslink stats would indicate, while Yahoo provides significantly less. Let’s analyze…
It’s important to remember that for the most part, what’s works for Google SEO also works for Yahoo, MSN and others. But there may also be differences in the way the various search engines rank websites.
For instance, for the keywords “web design danville ky” I hold the #4 and #5 positions on page 1 in a Google search and #4 on MSN, but I don’t appear until #91 in Yahoo despite getting several mentions in rankings for websites in which “web design by OrangeCat.net” appears in the footer.
It seems that Yahoo currently gives links more weight than content when determining relevancy.
The major point here is that there are inconsistencies in how the SEs use available information to rank web pages. I could probably spend a lot of time and money to optimize for Yahoo, but would that mess up my Google and MSN rankings?
The best bet might be to leave my SEO alone and buy some Yahoo Marketing ads. For my keywords, it would probably be very inexpensive, would surely be more effective and could be placed overnight instead of optimizing, then waiting weeks or months for my Yahoo rankings to improve.
By appearing on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN, I’ll have page one exposure on SEs representing 88.73% of searches. A quick check of rankings on other SEs shows satisfactory results.
So by all means prioritize Google when doing SEO, but don’t forget that a significant amount of traffic cans still come from Yahoo, MSN and others.
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