Google vs Yahoo & MSN
There exist basically three search engines out there that mean anything: Google, YAHOO, and MSN (a.k.a. Bing).
These are the only three on the market that give you any significant amount of traffic if you were to rank anywhere on the first page. ASK!, AOL, or Hotbot, are the runners up to the “big three” and are barely worth mentioning nor worth analyzing their merits at all.
After having established that fact I want to take this time to back up a minute. The idea for this post came from my recent trip to Montreal for two weeks.
Not to long into my trip I found myself into a heated argument with a stock broker/ trader who was trying to convince me that a) Bing, which is Microsoft’s new name for their woefully lacking search engine, has made inroads into Google’s gigantic gigantic market share and that b) if Microsoft is able to purchase YAHOO, like they have been trying for years, they will be able to compete toe to toe with Google.
It took everything in my body to keep from laughing at him! We got started on that subject because he was trying to convince me Microsoft was highly undervalued and had an enormous upswing based on what they are doing in the present and might be able to do in the future in the search engine department.
He was good and skilled at what he did but he did not know what he was talking about. All he could do was go by the news, press releases, and if you haven’t noticed the thousands of commercials “BING” is putting on television.
What am I getting at?
To the point if you do not rank high on Google you are nothing. I have to put it as bluntly and hopefully some people’s feelings are not hurt. You may have a sense of pride if your site is on page one of MSN or Yahoo but I’m telling you the “big G” is all that matters.
How do I know. My Statcounter tells me so.
When I rank #1 on Google for one of my targeted keywords I am able to produce 100s of organic hits per day.
When I rank #1 on MSN or Yahoo for one of my targeted keywords I am able to produce maybe 20-30 hits per day.
I have seen several charts and graphs showing that Google had an overall market share from as low as 65% to as high as 80%. I would put their overall dominance at at 90% from my true life experience.
Here is an example. I love pugs. I have two if the cutest pugs but they bark and yap all the time. So a little over a year ago I went and bought these bark collars that a friend suggested. They worked great. I thought to myself “why not start a blog about this.” So I did and and called it Anti Bark Collar Guide. It was a cool site to do and I perfectly optimized it. I was able to easily get links for it with other dog lovers and wrote some nice articles about the subject. Low and behold I rank on the first page of Yahoo and MSN. On Google I am on page three. How many hits do you think I’ve gotten over the last week for this term. 9 hits today, 4 hits yesterday, and 11 hits the day before. I think the highest number of hits I have gotten was 15 hits on a Wednesday. I rank on the first page on both Yahoo and MSN and that’s all that produces for a relatively medium-high researched term. Hum???
I am not going to say which other sites I own that rank on the first page of Google. That’s not important. Needless to say those sites, even some being at the bottom of page one, get 100 hits on a bad day. In my experience I have even found that being on page two of the “big G” is better than being on page one of any other search engines.
So I hope this clarified things a little bit. We design blogs for two reasons no matter if its for ourselves or our customers. Either we want to make money from our blogs through various forms of monitization or we are passionate about a subject and we want people to read it. To accomplish that you need visitors and the anything but ranking high on Google, as of 10/17/2009, will not produce that.
This information should be of use to you when you are designing a blog or website. You now know how you need to optimize it and what direction to go.
About the Author: Wesley Barras is a SEO specialist who writes about web design, search engine optimization techniques, and professional blogging. 
October 20th, 2009 at 3:16 am
I agree with you Wesley.
I do enjoy some great page one rankings in Yahoo and Bing, but they don’t bring much traffic. Not enough to make me want to optimize for them – or even wonder how to do so.
November 8th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Very nice information. I like it. I always wondered how different the two search engines were but I had no idea that it was so much. I hear that MSN or bing is trying to make a dent in Google and thats the reason they are coming up with this whole “Google Caffeine”