When I moved this blog from hosted Wordpress , I submitted the site to Google and Yahoo! After that, I noted the respective crawlers indexing the blog and thought no more of it.
I subsequently registered the site in Google Webmaster and Yahoo! Site Explorer and added a sitemap to help the robots index my site more efficiently. After a while, it was clear that Google was responsible for the vast majority of traffic to my humble blog. Mainly ‘one-hit wonders’ but welcome nevertheless.
Today, while dabbling with various reports in Google Analytics, I compared the performance of the two major search engines over the past nine months.
The statistics are quite staggering, to me at least. So much so, I have been moved to include inline images (which took me 14 hours and they’re still not right) to reinforce the point.
Over a period of nine months, Google (17,562) absolutely hammers Yahoo! (413) into the ground.
So then I started to get curious. Why does Google do such a better job of indexing my blog ?
The standard test I use is to search for a set of keywords from a recent blog entry and see whether it appears on page 1.
For this test, I used “under the covers at Wimbledon’ from a post made last Sunday. On Google, this appeared as the first post in the first page. I already know that Google is very timely at indexing my blog. If I post an blog article with an internal link (pingback), my RSS feed of Google inbound links notifies me instantly.
Here are the Google results. The blog article is the first entry displayed on the front page.
OK. So now for Yahoo!
Here is the Yahoo! equivalent. Nothing for the actual blog article on page 1. However, the main blog page is listed which happens to contain a snapshot reference to the article title.
Which is more relevant ? Which looks a better match for the actual search terms ? Which one would you be tempted to click on ? Which site would you advertise on ?
Next, I went to Yahoo! Site Explorer to see whether the actual blog article was indexed yet.
No it wasn’t. So, an interesting experiment and I am sure SEO magicians in white hats will arrive promptly to point out the error of my ways.
A footnote : The Yahoo! chart does appear to shows worrying signs of life from mid-May. The number of daily referrals jump from almost zero to almost a whole 10 visitors in a single day !
Come to think of it, Live.com (previously known as Dead.com) has also recently sparked into life, rising from the floor to reach the dizzy heights of a spike of 3 daily visitors.
Google beware !