We can each spend so much time concerned with how our website/s
are ranking on the Search Engines… Let’s step back for a minute
and look at how the Search Engines themselves are ranking. Where
are people, our customers, searching? Which Search Engines are
delivering the bulk of results? With answers to these questions
we can re-focus our efforts to ensure that were not wasting our
time trying to gain exposure in the wrong places.
There are two ways we can rank the search engines. The first,
is in terms of Popularity; the number of people that are using
the search engines to find products, services and information.
The second, and perhaps most important factor from a marketing
point of view, is Audience Reach; the number of search portals
that a Search Engine is showing its results through each day,
thereby reaching the maximum number of people.
First, lets look at Popularity. The following search engine
popularity figures were compiled by Neilson/NetRatings, a
provider of digital audience information and analysis. This
company monitors over 225,000 individuals in 26 countries to
gather its Internet usage results.
In October 2002, Search Engine Popularity in the U.S. was as
follows:
Google 29.2% Yahoo 28.5% MSN 28.1% AOL 19.7% Ask Jeeves 10.3%
Netscape 5.5% Overture 5.4% InfoSpace 5.1% AltaVista 4.4% Lycos
4.4% LookSmart 3.0% Earthlink 1.8%
(source: Search Engine Watch)
These figures tell us a lot about search engine usage; where
people are going to find their information. But what they don’t
tell us are more important facts about how widespread each
search engine’s listings are across the Internet as a whole.
Let’s look at this from a marketing perspective. Most major
search engines have agreements in place with each other and with
different search portals to display their results. This means
that their Audience Reach is actually much larger or smaller
than the Neilson/NetRatings results suggest.
Although actual figures are hard to determine, here’s how the
search engines rank from the perspective of Audience Reach:
1. Google Every web user, in every country, has access to
Google’s search results. As well as providing results via its
own search pages, Google supplies search results to Yahoo, AOL,
Ask Jeeves, Netscape, EarthLink and AT&T. Search services
InfoSpace, IWON and Simpatico.ca (Canada) also display their
listings. A high ranking listing at Google will return an
enormous amount of targeted traffic to your site because of its
wide audience reach through partner search sites.
2. Overture (formally GoTo.com) Overture is a pay-per-click
search engine. Its audience reach is also extremely wide.
Overture’s top three search results are displayed as the premier
listings on Altavista, MSN, Lycos, AllTheWeb(aka FAST), Excite
and Go.com. Its results are also displayed on hundreds of
smaller search portals. If your goal is to gain maximum exposure
within a few days and you are prepared to pay for it, Overture
will deliver maximum audience reach.
3. Inktomi Inktomi is not a search engine as such, but a
database comprised of paid listings delivered to its search
partners. Inktomi results are usually displayed on each of its
partners sites as secondary search results. Its listings are
displayed at: MSN, LookSmart, About.com, HotBot, Overture,
espotting.com (Europe) Terra.co(Spanish network), goo.ne.jp
(Japan)
4. FAST(AllTheWeb) FAST Search results power the listings at the
popular Lycos search portal. Lycos has the largest global
footprint of any Internet portal with more than 140 sites in 41
countries through its network of Web sites and partnerships.
FAST results are also displayed at Lycos Europe, Ask Jeeves,
AllTheWeb, WebCrawler, InfoSpace, Excite, DogPile, MetaCrawler
and other international partners.
5. AltaVista Altavista is a pure search engine. As well as
displaying Overture’s results, Altavista maintains 20
International search sites that are locally-optimized in each
country to display its results. Submitting to the main Altavista
site will include you in all International sites.
6. Open Directory (DMOZ) While this directory does not even
factor in the Neilson/NetRatings results, its audience reach is
significant. The Open Directory provides main search results to
Netscape Search as well as categorized directory results at AOL,
Google, Lycos and HotBot. Google regards a listing in the Open
Directory as very significant in terms of its PageRank system,
so a listing here will give your site a higher ranking at Google.
7. LookSmart A listing at LookSmart will enable your site to be
dispayed at the very popular MSN – the default search portal of
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Google also regards a
LookSmart listing highly in its PageRank system, which will in
turn help your site’s ranking at Google.
8. Yahoo A listing in Yahoo’s directory has become less
significant since they began to use Google search results as
primary listings. If you rank well on Google, you will rank well
at Yahoo and gain the first rate exposure this popular search
site provides. Google regards a listing at Yahoo as highly
significant in terms of PageRank, so a listing here will in turn
help your site’s relevancy with the Google search engine. What
you need to decide is: will a directory listing at Yahoo help
boost your ranking enough on Google to warrant the $299 annual
fee Yahoo charges.
9. Ask Jeeves/Teoma Ask Jeeves search results are powered by
Teoma. While this search portal is popular amongst Internet
users, its reach is not that significant. If your aim is to have
your site listed on all the major search engines, then this
would definitely be one to be listed with, although you may want
to focus your efforts on gaining a high ranking on the other
more significant search engines above for maximum traffic. Ask
Jeeves dispays the top four results from Google’s AdWords and ad
results from Lycos in a right hand column format.
What we can construe from the above results is that the
majority of Internet search results are delivered by a small
minority of search engines through a wide network of partner
search portals. When planning your search engine positioning
campaign, it is important to consider this. If you begin with
the idea of maximum audience reach in mind, your results will
return a wider net of targeted traffic.
About the author:
Drew Waters is a search engine positioning specialist, a
principal of Search Engine Coach, and author of the detailed &
popular e-book “Put Your Web Site on Top of the Search Engines:
Tools and Techniques for Top Ranking,” available at:
http://www.search-engine-coach.com
