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08.09.06
SES: SE Algorithms: Can You Please Them All?
 By
Mike Banks Valentine
Search engine specialists use to spend inordinate amounts of time creating pages that ranked well at just one search engine due to algorithmic weighting of known and very specific ranking factors.
But with duplicate content penalties and increasing complexity and number of strongly emphasized factors converging, most SEO's are moving toward using tweaks to important pages, rather than what were once known as "Doorway pages" or alternately, "Hallway pages" meant for just one engine for dozens of search phrases
per engine.
Most SEO firms now realize that the vast majority of referred search traffic comes from Google and that it is followed only (often at less than one-third the referral traffic) by Yahoo and then half as much again from MSN (with Ask trailing far behind at just fractional percentages of the referrals brought by the others). Therefore, most optimization efforts are spent toward making Google happy, and the others will mostly fall in behind by bestowing rankings at similar positions to those achieved at Google. Still, there are many interested in improving positions at Yahoo, MSN and Ask once they have achieved their best rank at the big G.
First speaker Aaron Wall of SEObook.com emphasized that algorithms are always in a state of evolution and offered a brief overview comparing observed ranking factors of each of the top search engines. Wall elicited a chuckle from the audience with the webmaster's quip, "A good search engine is one that ranks my sites well, a bad engine is one in which my site does badly." He suggested that there is "No such thing as a perfect algorithm." Wall asserts that, of necessity, SEO techniques evolve with the algo's. Because you rank well in one engine, it does not mean you'll do well in all.
Infrastructure or algorithmic changes may have unintended side effects. Wall mentioned Google Sandbox effect and suggested that it was really a side effect of an aging factor added to the algorithm, but that its' effect was positive overall to the index, so it was kept. He moved to discuss "Big Daddy" infrastructure effects, which for many webmasters meant large numbers of temporarily disappearing pages dropping from search results. That was widely discussed in webmaster forums when it resulted in wide swings of results for many until the index was able to readjust and settle over a few weeks. Many sites didn't regain positions they had before Big Daddy because they emphasized factors in their optimization that were downgraded by that major overhaul to the Google infrastructure.
Wall mentioned that new publishing formats can create algorithmic "holes" and gave two examples - Wikipedia and blogs. This was an "advanced" session, according to the conference schedule, so terms were not defined and it was assumed that most in attendance understood how different those publishing formats are. He also suggested that many will always attempt to game the system as new formats emerge.
Yahoo Focus was quite literal for years, but recently changed to be more like Google. "Nepotistic links" still working there. Bias toward commercial sites with their algo's. MSN newest to search and they entered when spam was already heavily gaming system. Google has biased toward information resources like .gov and .edu best at determining true link quality and bad links can hurt crawl depth. Places a lot of weight on domain level trust. Aggressive duplicate content filters. Google looks much more at linguistic patterns than the others and filters out some hyper focused pages. Some have called that "over-optimized".
He mentioned that ASk is not studied as much as others due to small size, so less is actually known about their algo's.
Dave Davies of Beanstalk SEO then took the stand, emphasizing items such as site architecture and URL importance on his first slide, showing standard SEO factors such as key content appearing higher on the page, above the fold. Heads around the room nodded as attendees agreed with the basics as he reviewed each item on the standard SEO checklist.
AS he moved to the "code to content ratio" he claimed it was a sizable weighting factor for his clients. While not revealing names of those clients, he did show several slides of example sites with keyword phrases highlighted and circled on the pages. He claims that nested tables and complex table structure hurts many sites and that when Beanstalk switched to "table-less design" from table structures, that his own site saw immediate increases in ranking with absolutely no changes to content. He went on to discuss SE friendly URL's and "flat filing" of dynamic content.
Davies said that when optimiizing for separate engines - MSN is by far the easiest, then Yahoo then Google. But then he said, "Ranking on MSN is essentially useless though, so I'd rather be on page three of Google than on page one of MSN." He claimed that relative ranking results in far more traffic, even though few searchers go past the first two pages of results. Google has very much higher referral numbers, so rankings are worth more on page three of Google results than page one of MSN. Determining which engine to target first for top ranking is therefore, quite easy. Ranking on MSN search is still not as valuable as ranking well on Yahoo.
About the Author:
Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of in-house content managers as well as contract SEO for advertising agencies, web development companies and marketing firms. |
