I read on a popular blog consultant’s website that he was on page 1 of three search engines for the phrase “blog consultant.” He asked his readers which one they’d have guess was the incongruent one if he hadn’t told them. It was a good question, but there are reasons to believe that it could have been any of them. They all do have different ranking factors, after all.

Google is usually good about weighing a variety of factors to rank pages in its search results, with a big tilt toward inbound link factors. Of course, they’ve got a lot more stricter in the last couple of years about what they consider a decent inbound link. The reason for that has been the huge increase in link schemes, which has tended to water down the search results.

Yahoo! is probably the worst search engine when it comes to favoritism. They seem to favor advertisers over non-advertisers, although I’ve seen search results from non-Yahoo! advertisers hit the top. Consistently, however, they tend to give higher rankings to their advertisers even while considering other factors like on-page SEO and link quality. Their inbound link algorithm is a lot more liberal than Google’s.

MSN is a bit different. I’m not quite sure what they’ve got going on. It is perhaps the least consistent of the major search engines. Sometimes they are the first to crawl a website. At other times, they will be the last. If MSN doesn’t like something on your web pages, they will not list you in their SERPs for a long time. If they do, however, then you could be No. 1 while sliding down the pole in the other search engines.

Ask puts more emphasis on meta tags than any of the other search engines. For the most part, meta tags are history. It’s surprising that Ask still favors them. It’s not the only criteria for them, but it is one that distinguishes them from the other search engines and you can tell it in their results.

Which search engine do you rank highest for?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines, Search Trends. 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.