Search engines are what make your business profitable. Your site must be found to turn viewers into potential clients correct? The good news is that 80%+ search queries are preformed at Google.com. Google although does have it’s share of ups and downs is still hands down the largest and most stable search engine of the big 3. This leaves 20%- of the searches to the 2 underdogs Yahoo and MSN, which in recent months seem to have destroyed their search results in a race to try to advance their technologies in hopes of catching up to Google. In theory Yahoo is 3-5 years behind Google with MSN a couple years behind that of Yahoo.

Even though Google is still top dog, there have been some general worries from many people around the world when looking up their rankings in Yahoo and MSN. In their race to advance their algorithms MSN and Yahoo have crippled what did work for them.

Let us start with MSN. Their 1^st update of the year was back in February , 2008. Not many people said much about this update (but what was said was negative) as it was probably something they needed for the update that just came out yesterday March 24, 2008. This update was meant to loosen up the spam filters some to increase the number of sites they had listed in the results. Now many people are seeing wacky results when they do searches. Maybe they opened it a tad bit too far?

The search results are so horrible that even the Moderator of webmasterworld.com, Caveman, who claims he doesn’t post much about updates had this to say:

“Don’t often comment in update threads anymore, but am forced to agree. Oddly, both authoritative sites (often with ranking pages that should not have ranked), and quality niche sites, seem to have taken a hit on this go around.

I expect it had something to do with ridding their SERP’s of the dominance of stray pages from high auth sites (i.e., where the stray pages were ranking too well), but the net result has been more pages from iffy, third tier sites ranking than I have seen in long while.

A lot of spammy mini-nets too. Reminds me of Yahoo five years ago. Especially the weird stuff, like niche sites with top ranking homepages, and badly performing high level subpages. Illogical, split personality stuff.

First step should be to clear the junk out, then fine tune. This seems to be the other way round.

<added> A lot of mess-ups on the geo and local fronts too. </added>”

The only ranking consistency with the algorithms at MSN is that they are still placing considerable weight on having the keyword in your domain URL and a good description Meta tag. The future is not all that bright yet at MSN as they still have much to do to get their results up to par with Google, so we will wait, hope, and see.

Now for a word on Yahoo search. Yahoo is going through a trying time. The beginning of the year started with talks about MSN buying out Yahoo for 44 Billion dollars, which Yahoo declined. There are also talks that Yahoo must lay off Thousands of people. They apparently have been having problems and it reflects in their search results. One poster over at seoroundtable.com had this to say:

“I have absolutely seen changes in the indexing. I have been in the top 4 to 5 for the last 6 months then BOOM I’m down into the abyss and my site really hasn’t changed that much. Now all you see in the top ten, with exception of the top 2 is nothing but garbage and really has no relevance to plus size lingerie or they are crappy doorway pages. I get reindexed and I’m put in the top 10 for about 6 hours and then I’m instantly put at posistion 21 as if a human is doing it intentionaly. What the hell is going on with Yahoo!?”

As you can see both Yahoo and MSN need to step it up if they wish to keep their loyal surfers from leaving and going over to Google. Yahoo may be trying to fix this though and we shall see in the near future as they release a little more information. But, for those that are interested it could be in the works that Yahoo is building a new search engine algorithm all together and we will just have to wait to see what they have in store. You can read about what they have released at Yahoo’s Blog.

So to recap, Google is still reigning supreme as the peoples’ choice and for good reasons. Yahoo and MSN have a lot of work to do, not only to catch up with Google but they are running out of time to save their loyal fans and in the big picture their enterprises. All we can say is try not to worry too much about your rankings in these 2 search engines as not just your website took a hit, it is happening all over. And if the result pages don’t tend to get better over this next stretch of time no one will use them to make their search queries anyway. Well it is time to start search engine optimization and ranking on Google!! Until next time happy surfing!

-Jim Trivolette “The SEO Doctor”

Tags: MSN update, search engine algorithms, search engine optimization, Yahoo update

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