SMJ Solutions

On Search Engines

December 30th, 2006

Last month I wrote about search engine optimization (SEO), so this month I have been paying much more attention to how my site is crawled by search engine spiders, what my results look like in these search engines, and also how much traffic I receive from search engines.

I took a look at the big four search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN (Live), and Ask to see how they stacked up. I was surprised with what I found.

On my humble site, I get crawled most often by the MSNbot. Perhaps not surprisingly, I also get more referrals from the MSN Live Search than from any other search engine. Also, I have noticed that when I make changes to the site, Live search is the most responsive of the search engines.

One simple example demonstrates how differently these search engines operate. My most popular post to date was Fantasy Football Team Names, announcing the Fantasy Football Team Name Generator I created. If you’re trying to find a good team name for your fantasy team, you would want to see this link in your search results. So, let’s query fantasy football team names into the big search engines and take a look at where the post from smjsolutions.com comes in.

The Google search didn’t list the post in the top 200 results. I noticed a lot of pages that weren’t even close to relevant. Google didn’t perform well here.

The Yahoo! search wasn’t any better. Again the post we were looking for wasn’t in the top 200 results and there were a lot of what looked like garbage links, stuff that wasn’t going to help us with our fantasy football team names at all.

Searching Ask didn’t list the page we were looking for in the top 128 results (it wouldn’t let me keep going), but it did give some other helpful search terms to try. It didn’t seem like it had as many garbage links as Yahoo! and Google did, but it still didn’t find what we were looking for.

The Live search totally bucks the trend. The page we were looking for actually shows up on the first page of results! Not did we find the page we were looking for, but the other links seem relevant and useful.

Why the huge difference? Is the new Live search that much better than Yahoo! and Google? I just don’t know. I’ll leave that for the SEO gurus of the web to figure out. However, because of these results, I’ve started to use Live search more often and it has become the default engine of my Firefox search toolbar.

Entry Filed under: Web