SEO Blog

Here’s a search engine oddity. Go visit msn.com, and type in the query “search engine” Then look at the results. No MSN, Google, Yahoo, or any other major search engine in the top 10. True, search.com and searchenginecolossus are there. But none of the majors. Now keep going.

Lycos appears at #31. MSN search, Google and Yahoo don’t appear anywhere in the top 100.

There’s lots of entries for discussion forums, and some blogs, which discuss the search engines, but the search engines themselves are strangely absent. (Microsoft Search for Enterprise Server kicks in at around #87)

I find this curious. If I type ’search engine’ into a search engine, I would expect a list of search engines. I would expect other resources about search engines, such as Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com) to appear as well, (and it is #1 in my results), but predominantly, I would expect actual search engines in the results. In comparison, when I performed a similar query in other engines, I found actual search engines in the results.

Last week, Yahoo made a major update to their search index.

Tim Mayer, from Yahoo Search made a posting about it on July 20, and invited feedback. Of course most people complained!

We’ve been monitoring results across our client database. No mean feat - we have more than 2500. To date, most of our clients are doing well with the update. No one has dropped off the map, quite a few have increased their positioning.

Why have we been unaffected? I’m not sure, as I don’t specifically know WHAT was adjusted in their algorithm. (I’m hoping to figure that out later this week when I have time to breathe!)

Perhaps the lack off drop offs has less to do with what we do, and more about what we don’t do. Specifically, perhaps it’s a bit of the ‘white hat / black hat’ scenario again?

I do believe that the fact that none of our clients has dropped yet has a lot to do with the fact that our firm uses very straightforward tactics. We don’t look for holes in the algorithms. We concentrate on ensuring that the search engines can understand what is relevant about the site accurately.