Mar 14th, 2007
Ranking Trends in the Search Engines
Search Engine Watch had a recent post about how long it takes a new site to rank in the search engines. Of course, there are hundreds of factors that come into play here that were not mentioned or taken into consideration, but what I did like about the post were the comments on the general ranking trends that the search engines follow. Here’s what Eric Enge had to say:
“…Yahoo and MSN are much faster to accept what their crawler finds (in terms of content and links) at face value. Google is much slower to do so. This is consistent with the general industry belief that Google puts more weight on temporal factors, and needs to build trust in a site before giving it higher rankings.
The speculation about why Google does this is to reduce its susceptibility to SPAM. A side affect of this, however, is that it may not always carry the most authoritative content, particularly when that content is new.”
For the majority (I would say 95%) of our clients, this general trend is true. MSN usually picks up on new sites and site optimization changes first, then Yahoo comes around shortly thereafter with lower rankings and finally Google comes through, but it’s usually a much longer waiting time between Google and Yahoo than it is between the first two.
A great example of this would be my site. I’m showing up in MSN for 9 out of 10 keywords that I searched on (I only checked the first 10 pages). In Yahoo, I’m only showing up for 4 out of those same 10 keywords and in Google I’m only showing up for 3. My rankings will change as time goes on, but it almost always follows this general trend.