Recent Changes at Yahoo, Google, and MSN

There are many changes taking place in the top search engines.Google, Yahoo, and MSN are all adapting to the many transformations occuring within the search industry. Because of these changes, I thought I would take the time to give you an overview of what’s taking place within the market and how it affects you as a webmaster. To begin, let’s start with Google.

Back in 2003, Google would index and crawl the web about once a month and everything would change all in one shot. WebMasterWorld would actually name these updates with names like Brandy, Florida, and Bourbon.
Some advertisers have even been effectively shutdown.

However, keep in mind that not all advertisers have been affected. There are four main types of sites that have been hit the hardest. These include:

* one page sales letter websites
* squeeze pages
* adsense sites (particularly those involved in Adsense arbitrage)
* affiliate sites

The new landing page algorithm gives a quality score to every landing page. Fortunately for us, Google has left some clues as to how they are ranking these pages.

Below are 3 general guidelines that will help those who have been hurt by the recent updates.

1. Provide relevant and substantial content.
2. Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information related to the product or service in your ad.
3. Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site’s content.

To stay in accordance with the new quality score guidelines, you may want to remove all Adsense ads from your landing pages, create or find more original content for your sites, ensure that your landing page has at least 500 words, and check to make sure that your ad relates perfectly with the content of your landing page.
Google is getting smarter everyday. Our job is not to trick the search engines but to deliver truly valuable information to our visitors. By doing this along with some basic on-page and off-page optimization techniques, you should perform very well in the search engines over the long-haul.

There have also been some recent changes at MSN.

They have changed the name of their search engine spiders. Before the changes, they were all called “msnbot,”. Fortunately, they are now starting to group their spiders into separate categories.

The MSN Shopping bot is msnbot-products.
The MSN News bot is msnbot-news.
The MSN Image Search bot is msnbot-media.
The MSN search bot is still called msnbot.

It should now be much easier for webmasters to decipher what’s really going on in their web logs. In addition, webmasters can also block specific bots if they need to, without blocking MSN Search.

Last, but not least, there is Yahoo. This company has experienced some very exciting changes within the past few months.

One of these is the launch of a new Yahoo Search Crawler. The new crawler is faster and more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, website owners should notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the Yahoo crawler.

Yahoo also released an index update in mid-July. You can read all about it at http://www.ysearchblog.com.

In addition, there are a number of other, smaller-based search engines who are leading the way in the future of search engine technology. One of the best examples I have seen is Eurekster.com. They have developed a social search engine powered by the wisdom of crowds.

Eurekster makes use of its own SearchMemory technology, which remembers the sites a user finds useful and presents them higher in the results the next time they search. Then, Eurekster lets a user share their searches and sites with friends. For example, if you do a search on “internet marketing”, you’ll see sites related to “internet marketing” that your friends also found useful. These results are marked with an icon.

This personalization helps to increase relevancy in a way that no algorithm can match.

I expect to see many changes within Google, Yahoo, and MSN in upcoming years as they merge search engine technology with social search in order to make search results more relevant as well as personalized. One thing is clear, the future evolution of search is sure to be exciting to watch.
By Kim Roach (c) 2006

About The Author
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and SEO-News newsletters.