MSN Search On The Rise, Google On The Decline
According to this report released by OneStat Google’s share in the search engine wars has decreased 0.3% in the last 8 months, while rival’s MSN share increased 0.3%. However, Google still has a commanding lead in the arena with Yahoo placing a distant second.
- Google 56.9%
- Yahoo 21.2%
- MSN Search 8.9%
- AOL Search 3.2%
What does this mean for webmasters? If Google isn’t the #1 search engine referral for your site you may need to optimize it a bit better. Besides that nothing really has changed. In my case I need to figure out how to get Yahoo to like my sites a bit better because they barely make a blip on my radar.
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POSTED IN: SEO
5 opinions for MSN Search On The Rise, Google On The Decline
Anthony
Sep 27, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Hey Paul,
I don’t agree that you need to optimise better if Google isn’t the number one search engine referral for a person’s site.
I’ve think for some people, especially bloggers, it might be better to optimise for the other SEs and avoid the mad scramble for Google’s attention so you get a bigger % of the smaller audience of the other SEs. I’ve seen it work out to be roughly the same traffic spread over a number of sources instead of relying just on Google. This way people aren’t as affected by Google algorithm changes when they occur. Also, I’ve found that MSN and Yahoo! reward on site factors (eg. great content) more that Google does.
Scrivs
Sep 27, 2005 at 10:58 pm
Anthony,
My feeling is that if you can be successful in Google you can be successful in any of the SEs and that’s why I go along with the philosophy of aiming for quality rankings on it. Of course you should strive for the perfect SEO where you are #1 in all SEs, but if you can be only #1 in one why not making the one with the most traffic?
I could understand going for the others and avoiding Google thinking that a lot of little one should equal one big one, but looking at the numbers above we can see that isn’t the case when Google represents over 55% of the web’s SE traffic.
Anthony
Sep 28, 2005 at 1:29 am
I do agree that in an ideal world you want your own traffic source figures to closely reflect the SE usage stats. It’s just that sometimes the Google Gods don’t agree and it might be an idea for some bloggers to avoid the congestion of focusing on Google and reap the spoils the other SEs can offer.
Scrivs
Sep 28, 2005 at 1:31 am
Is it even possible to develop a SEO strategy that focuses on only one SE though?
Anthony
Sep 28, 2005 at 9:42 pm
Not some much a seperate SEO strategy but just not the focus/obsession that some webmasters/bloggers that have with Google. But like I said prevously with on site optimisation/content, I’ve seen it get you a more instant benefit with other SEs compared to Google where you still need planned off site SEO activities to build consistent traffic levels.
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