in Black and White | SEO Secrets & Insider Tricks

Search Engines

Where would we be without search engines? It is difficult to imagine the World Wide Web without them because it would be a whole different experience. A bit like trying to get from one end of the country to the other without a road map (or these days; the latest in-car satellite navigation system).

Perhaps you have seen those ads claiming to submit a site to “thousands” of search engines? Well you might be interested to see some statistics for the most popular search engines as accessed from the UK during September 2007:-

UK Search Engine Analysis, September 2007

Rank          Search Engine          Traffic Volume
1                www.google.co.uk          70.25%
2                www.google.com            14.95%
3                www.uk.ask.com               3.55%
4                uk.search.yahoo.com         3.52%

  Source - Hitwise - September, 2007 - based on volume of searches.

Ok, we can see where the UK population's loyalties lie when it comes to searching the Web. But what about the larger picture for searches worldwide?

Top 10 Search Providers, August 2007

Provider          Searches (000)         Share of Total (%)
Google              4199495                     53.6
Yahoo               1561903                     19.9
MSN                  1011398                     12.9
AOL                     435088                       5.6
ASK.Com             136853                       1.7
My Web Search     71724                       0.9
Bellsouth               37762                       0.5
Comcast                34699                       0.4
My Way                 32483                       0.4
SBC Yellow Pages 31912                       0.4
Other                   275812                      3.5

Source – SearchEngineWatch.com - September, 2007

So it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that submitting to thousands of search engines is not all that it is cracked up to be by the advertisers offering such a service. From the above statistics it is also obvious that:-

Google is Number One

The gripe that many have is that Google has developed rules for search engine ranking that just aren't fair. Well, whether you agree with that statement or not, Google is without a doubt the most popular search engine on the Web today – and that doesn't look like changing any day soon -  so whether the rules are fair or not we have to live with them. And that invariably means tailoring our Web sites to suit Google's requirements.

Nobody can say for certain exactly how search results are obtained because Google's unique algorithm is kept secret, but some of the things that Google looks at when deciding where in the SERPS a particular web page will rank are:

• Relevant keywords on the page
• Keywords in link anchor text
• The number of inbound links the page has
• The age of those inbound links
• The number of inbound links on the page linking to yours
• The age of inbound links on the page linking to yours
• And so on...

Are you getting the idea? The Google algorithm is VERY complicated and it is also changing regularly. Of course, this  also means that when searching for some particular information it usually returns very valid results. Not for nothing did Google get to number one in the hit parade of search engines.