Recent changes in Yahoo / Google

by Jerry West
Updated May 15, 2005

As Yahoo! and Google continue to rank as the top two search engines, I will summarize the recent changes in both search engines.

Google
Google updates their PageRank information at least once per month, which is the number of incoming links to a particular page. Of the domains I track, there was an 18% average increase, which is higher than the 4.8% average monthly increase this year. This is important, as Google has been purging their index as of late. They have cleared over 1 billion pages from their index. The reason this is important is that despite fewer pages in the index, incoming links are increasing. This points to a better overall index.

What Was Removed?
When Update Florida occurred, Google's intent was to penalize and filter out of their results affiliate content that was cluttering up their search results. For example, searching for a product would produce the same page, content, and pricing for the top ten results, as all the pages were from affiliates.

What's Wrong With Affiliate Pages?
It is duplicate content, and Google is high on unique content. After Update Florida which penalized affiliate pages, Google then sought after to remove the duplicate content completely from their index. This is where the one billion page "purge" came in. What the process perfect? No. But the results in Google are cleaner than they have in the past.

Google continues to reward sites that update their site multiple times per month and continually add new pages of quality, unique, relevant content.

Next week I will cover what to do and more importantly what not to do to rank well in Google.

Yahoo!
The only real difference between the two engines is the Yahoo! Paid Inclusion, or Site Match. Yahoo! has been taking a lot of heat for using paid inclusion, and their revenues have taken a hit recently. It is still our recommendation not to use their paid inclusion and I will show you next week how to get listed in Yahoo! without using the paid inclusion or the free submission link.

Yahoo! Slurp, the spider Yahoo! uses to index pages for their search results has been very active lately, more active than in the last six months. Yahoo! is aggressively seeking to out do Google in terms of index size. Currently Yahoo! has just under 2 million pages indexed, which is about 40% of Google's index.

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Jerry West is the Director of Internet Marketing. He has been consulting on the web since 1996 and has assisted hundreds of companies gain an upper-hand over their competition. Visit Web Marketing Now for the latest in marketing tips that are tested and proven.

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