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Multiple Search Engine Universe
Friday, December 10, 2004
Today, Google's market share of organic search results is shrinking
rapidly while the size and influence of Yahoo and MSN's organic
search increases. Add to the mix a number of up and coming search
firms such as AskJeeves and the new Chinese Government owned Accoona,
and we see a remarkable picture emerging, the end of the mono-culture
search universe. This has great implications for SEOs and their
clients as the number of essential search tools to get listings
on has increased. For clients, it will be easier to be found if
there are more places to find your site, and for SEOs, it will become
easier to make client sites findable. A multi-engine search-universe
will also protect site owners from difficult periods like the one
experienced during the infamous Florida Update of last Christmas
season.
Today, Google has approximately 46% of the organic search market
with Yahoo (26%) and MSN (21%) following close behind. (Yahoo owns
Inktomi, a database of spidered sites that currently provides results
to MSN.Com. These results will be replaced by a proprietary database
when the new MSN(beta) search is released.
Back in 1999, there were six major search engines, Alta Vista,
Lycos, Infoseek, AOL, Yahoo and the new upstart, Google. Each search
tool had unique characteristics and each depended on what were then
fairly rigid keyword densities. This led to the creation of "doorway"
pages, or a series of pages designed to rank well on different search
engines under a set of keyword phrases. A unique doorway page would
be created for each search engine, and in some cases, each keyword
phrase targeted. This technique led to the obvious clogging of search
engines with a lot of useless pages, "page-pollution".
While the similarities between the Big3 search tools should limit
the urge to design them, webmasters and SEOs are cautioned to watch
to make sure this technique doesn't become common again.
Google Dives Deeper
Common-sense SEO once stated that Google only likes to travel to
the second layer of a database, or as far as the second variable
in the URL. Sometimes it would delve deeper into a site but often
it would not. That was the conventional wisdom until very recently.
According to SEO Roundtable moderator "projectphp", GoogleBot
is now capable of diving down to the sixth variable in database
URLs.
This has fairly large implications for SEOs worrying about getting
specific product listings for their clients. In the past, we were
always forced to tell clients that we could not force Google deep
into a database but would do our best to get visitors as close as
possible. Now, it is obviously possible for a dynamically generated
page to achieve strong listings, provided the requisite SEO has
been performed. A note of caution though. Many databases are extremely
deep and contain literally thousands of different products. SEO
work on every product page may prove cost-prohibitive. There is
however, some hope that effective site-mapping and very tight SEO
work on basic templates will be able to provide a strong work-around
to cost considerations.
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