Differences Between Google/Yahoo/MSN

[Hazo]

I know this is a very general question but I would like to know more about the major differences between these search engines. What different factors do they place more weight on etc.

My results tend to vary significantly between each search engine and I'm trying to work on improving my optimisation for each.

[CoolDog]

I personally don't even bother optimizing for SE's other than Google. I have some very high ranking (and high queried) terms on Yahoo and see very little traffic from them. It would be quite different if I had those same terms that rank well on Yahoo, rank well on Google.

I do see that over a long period of time, like a year or so, that my rankings on MSN and Yahoo do improve for terms that ranked low to begin with.

[MJ]

[QUOTE=CoolDog;27818]I have some very high ranking (and high queried) terms on Yahoo and see very little traffic from them. It would be quite different if I had those same terms that rank well on Yahoo, rank well on Google.
QUOTE]

Can't agree with this more, although I admit I was suprised it was the case when I noticed it.

[LennyP]

It is my understanding that Yahoo cares more about pure link quantity whereas Google place more importance on the actual quality of the links. Google is by far the most commonly used search engine so that is what I would focus on.

[kushmoney]

I just focus on ranking in google then slowly see traffic from yahoo and msn as I rank higher and higher for google. Don't know why it works that way but it does.

[Hazo]

Does anyone have any solid information on this topic to share? The only info I can gather is that Yahoo like a shitload of links.

[jdogg4000]

i only really use google but some people say they get a lot of there traffic from yahoo

[Michael Martinez]

A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that if they have good rankings on Yahoo! for the same terms they have good rankings on Google they should see similar traffic. There are many differences between the search engines and you have to take those differences into consideration when developing a robust search engine optimization plan. Generally speaking, if you're only relying on Google you're probably missing out on most of the potential traffic you could be getting from search.

Google's real market share is somewhere between 35 and 40 per cent of the market. It's impossible to determine market share accurately but no more than about 140 million people visit Google on a monthly basis (according to estimates you can check for yourself at Quantcast and Compete). Microsoft serves about 100 million visitors per month and Yahoo! serves somewhere around 60 million search visitors per month (you have to look at estimates for search.yahoo.com, not just yahoo.com).

Search engines differ in many ways, as I noted above. Here are a few of the types of differences that affect your search referral traffic:

• Demographics - Each search engine has a unique core audience, although they share most of their visitors/users with other search engines.
• Data - Each search engine builds its own index, starting its crawls from its own seed set. The best available estimates suggest there is no better than 60% overlap between Google and Yahoo!'s data.
• Core technologies - Yahoo!'s technology differs substantially from Google's in many ways. Yahoo! is more "link friendly" than Google, for example.
• Filtration priorities - Google appears to have the most aggressive filters, blocking and penalizing more sites than other search engines.
• Resources - Google has more and larger data centers than the other search engines.
• Content offered by the search engines themselves

The demographics differ substantially between the search engines, particularly where their core audiences are concerned. Quantcast estimates that 50% of all visits to Google are made by no more than 10% of their visitors.

Google has always appealed to a more technical audience (programmers, engineers, scientists, and Internet specialists).

Yahoo!, on the other hand, built a huge media-entertainment audience (because their CEO for many years, Jerry Semel, had been hired away from Hollywood to turn Yahoo! into a media/entertainment conglomerate).

Microsoft has always appealed to a different audience. Many people feel there is more of a bias toward women in Microsoft's audience because they leverage their MSN properties. However, Quantcast suggests that Microsoft's audience is 2/3 male. Quantcast estimates that more than half of Microsoft's visitors are 35 or older. Microsoft has a strong appeal among African-Americans.

By contrast, Quantcast suggests that Google's audience is younger than Microsoft's and that it is more evenly divided between men and women. Google has a strong appeal among Asians.

Quantcast also estimates differences in affluence for Google and Microsoft's core audiences (but be careful not to tie all these data together -- there is no basis for assuming specific correlations).

For Yahoo!, Quantcast estimates slightly more women than men, a slightly younger audience than Google, strong appeal to African-Americans and Asians, but a more even spread across the affluent groups than either Microsoft or Google show.

You're less likely to find college graduates visiting Yahoo! than Google or Microsoft.

Something these numbers don't show you, however, is how people search and research indicates that people tend to use different queries on different search engines. Why is that? Some researchers have guessed or deduced that if a searcher starts out on search engine A and abandons that search engine, they then try search engine B AND change their query at the same time.

Now, it's true that many people change their queries on a single engine but a phenomenon called "search fatigue" has been found to result in people simply giving up on a search engine and either trying another search engine or abandoning queries altogether.

Finally, let me point out that Google has done a better job of providing people with satisfactory information in its search results -- so fewer people actually click on listings in Google's search results than would have if Google were not trying to be a content provider. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft also offer local search (map search) and similar features but Google has been the most productive marketer of these types of services.

So people do tend to use search engines as destinations much more than they did a few years ago, and that can work against webmasters in some queries.

I cannot tell you which search engines would be the most productive for your industry -- in fact, I am citing American data but as I understand it your sites have larger appeal to European and Asian audiences than typical American Web sites. Nonetheless, I think the data serve as a good illustration for how to identify differences between search engines.

One very common mistake that many professional SEOs make is they assume the query data provided by Google is relevant to what people search for on other search engines. That is a completely false assumption. Google's query data is only relevant for Google's users. You have to look at the query patterns in data provided by Yahoo! for Yahoo! and in data provided by Microsoft for Microsoft.

If you're basing your search marketing decisions only on data you gather from Google, you're cutting yourself short. Google cannot tell you what people are doing on other search engines. Hence, optimizing only for queries where you know the traffic flows on Google is a pretty sure way of defeating your efforts to draw traffic from other search engines.

[Hazo]

Thanks for the awesome, in depth reply Michael. Greatly appreciated. Now to work out how to optimise for the other engines...

[Sebastian]

Thanks for copying my post Michael

Just kidding of course.

Sebastian