Is it Possible to Optimize for Every Search Engine?

Google loves well-aged sites. Yahoo loves meta-keywords. Live loves fresh content. And who really cares what Ask likes. (Just kidding…but seriously, who cares.)

With so many differences between the major engines, subtle though they may be, is it really possible to optimize for every one of them? To push matters further, is it even worth trying to optimize for them all? With Google taking the cake on search engine market share, is it worth worrying about the under dogs?

Take a look at the (major) differences…

Only Major Issues of Optimizing for Everything

Generally, Google does not like meta-keywords; Yahoo does. There’s always been speculation as to whether Google finds meta-keywords spammy; perhaps a healthy balance could work here – something to test out!
Using robots.txt vs. robots-nocontent, depending on who you want to optimize for.

Is it even worth optimizing for anything other than Google?

For the most part, I tend to focus entirely on Google. I check for indexed pages for a new site there first. I check PageRank before WebRank. I use nofollows and robots.txt, not robots-nocontent.

Maybe I’m just partial to Google; then again, isn’t everyone?

Nicki Hicks
Equal Opportunity SEO

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Is it Possible to Optimize for Every Search Engine?”

How Image Alt Tags Affect Traffic and Why You Should Use Them | Maine SEO Blog: Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Says:
March 24th, 2009 at 10:20 am
[...] for “search engine differences”, you’ll find a chart I made as the first result for a post I did a while back. The small matter of whether anyone is even searching for “search engine differences” [...]
Google Showing Local Results On Non-Local Queries — Hobby Cash: Make Cash Blogging About the Things You Love Says:
April 1st, 2009 at 4:54 pm
[...] Is it Possible to Optimize for Every Search Engine? | Maine SEO Blog [...]
Internet Marketing ABC Says:
April 3rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Great point. I also optimize for Google mainly – because,let’s face it, when it comes to search, they are the best. Yeah, Yahoo and MSN might convert better on certain ecommerce terms, but the benefit they have with conversion is far outdone by Google by sheer mass. I’ll rather take 10000 people at 0.5% conversion than 300 people at 1% conversion (and the difference in conversion is not nearly as big as I make it in this example).
5 Ways to Rank Better at Bing | Maine SEO Blog Says:
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:45 pm
[...] Google is still king, but Microsoft’s Bing has been getting a lot of press (I do enjoy the Bing! noise). So while I will forever optimize for Google first, it’s important to understand what other search engines care about. [...]

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