Search Engine News January 2010

January 1, 2010

To start the new year off I thought I would bring up various news on how and what the various search engines are doing. Where you stand in the search engines can greatly affect your business, keeping on top of it is a full time job (I get 6 different news feeds a day spending a good part of each day going over what is happening in search engine land).

No More Supplemental Index
According to the Google Webmaster Blog it has been announced that they now have one major index. So what this means is that before you at least had a crack at the supplemental index if you weren't doing well, now you either make it or don't.

Google still growing
Google accounted for 64.49 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending October 27, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN...

...Search and Ask.com each received 21.65, 7.42 and 4.76 percent respectively. The remaining 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.68 percent of U.S. searches.

- includes executed searches onLive.com and MSN Search.

So in the last 3 months Google has gone from roughly 61% to 65% at the expense of Yahoo and MSN.

Why the difference between search engine standings?
Yahoo seems to be more interested in on site content than MSN or Google but still like links.. Google is most interested in links, MSN links and content. So if you do well for content and links to your site you can't lose.

Mirror sites and duplicate content
There are two different types of duplicate content, and they are both handled very differently. On-site duplicate content is filtered (by Google), having part of an article on one page with the rest on another page etc. In this case, Google simply decides which copy of the duplicated content will be returned in search, unless you are being very specific in your search terms, in which case you can get Google to return some or all the different variations of the article.

Off-site duplication, where an entire site is replicated under another domain name, usually involves a penalty for one of the involved sites. Even if the algorithm is not actually trying to penalize one of the duplicate sites, that is the result, because one of the sites will no longer show up in the results.

Note: This is entire site duplication, not just some articles.

Sub Domains
Google now lumps all information in sub domains into one set of results. Used to be if you had www.gofish.com and one.gofish.com and two.gofish.com you would get separate results for each, now just one.