Nowdays, i’m sure you all know that Google has the largest share of the search market, but why is that?? Apart from the Firefox integration and Google’s many other products, it’s simply because their search is the best. Since 1997, with the inception of PageRank, Google have spent well over 10 years adding ’signals’ to their algoritm or tweaking it slightly. This constant striving for better search means that recently launched competitors, such as Bing, are years behind, but are there any advantages in using any other search engines? Looking at it from a search engine marketing point of view there are tactics you can use that, as Google updates and they become worthless, may have been forgotten.
For instance, it might be worth making two sites, then keeping one for long term organic link building on Google, whilst using aggressive tactics to gain quick results on Bing/Yahoo. Below is a quick comparison on a few points:
Google.com
- One of the most advanced and long running search engines
- Trusts old pages, maybe too much
- Crawl depth determined both by link quality and quantity
- Page and link anchor text variations important, filters for keyword stuffing
- Looks for natural long term link growth
- Heavy bias towards informational resources
- Very good and agressive duplicate content filters
- Very old pages/domains can rank bettee than they should with a small number of links
Bing (now also providing for Yahoo and AltaVista)
- Not good at seeing if links are natural or atificial
- Lots of weight placed on page content
- Easier to rank with newer sites
- Spam type linking still works
- Commercial results bias (quite heavy)
Sadly, the search engine market just isn’t what it used to be. Several years ago Yahoo purchased AltaVista, and now Bing has struck a deal to provide both their results. With the dominance of Google and now the merging of lots of smaller search engines, it only really leaves Google and Bing. Currently, Google accounts for nearly 63% of the market, with Bing and Bing-powered sites taking around 32% and the other a paltry 5% between them. Bing/Yahoo have gained some small amount of ground recently, and will probably gain more, but for the moment ’search engine optimisation’ really means ‘Google optimisation’, and this shoud influence the entire web design and marketing process.