Observations 1

Clifinar – Observations on the search engines indexing – part 1

This page is meant to be an observation on the differences between the way Google, Yahoo and Windows live index new content on the internet.

This example is a really good one because it is done fully under a controlled environment inside an SEO firm.

The Clifinar competition and its purpose:

As I mentioned, in my Clifinar posts, the Clifinar competition is all about promoting a made up word in Google and after a month to see who is in the top position in it’s search results.

The way I see it the Clifinar competition has several goals: to raise the employees motivation, to help us all improve our SEO and SEM skills, to give us an opportunity to try new ideas and in my case at least to find out more about the differences between the way the three major search engines index new information. And this is why I created this page.
On the 5th day into the competition I have searched for the term “Clifinar” in Google, Yahoo and Live and made screen shots of the results:
Google Clifinar results
Yahoo Clifinar results
Live Clifinar results

Findings:

First of all, I have to say that as early as 5 hours into the competition Google had already indexed about 5 or 6 results for a term that was non existent before (I am sorry to say that I didn’t think of looking into the Yahoo and Live results until later so I don’t know how fast the index the results).

At first the results in Google were pretty “spammy” – comments and links in friends’ blogs or forums that led to empty pages or with poor content, linkedin comment and others similar. There were even a few diggs on the story (made by some of us obviously).

Back to the comparison.

The top 10 results for Clifinar in the major search engines were quite different and it was very easy for me to see the quality of each one and perhaps even the power they set for different kind of sites.

Clifinar and Google:

It was obvious that Google was the fastest to remove the comments and the links from the top results and index more quality and relevant sites for the Clifinar query, such as blogs, squidoo pages and hub pages which are currently surprisingly strong. Articles started to take up several of the top 20 positions as well.

Clifinar and Yahoo:

In Yahoo I found that the content was mixed with an inclination towards the “spammier” content. Even so, the top result was of a Clifinar site created in wetpaint so it looks like Yahoo is on the right track. I want to follow up on this and see if Yahoo doesn’t give web 2.0 site stronger positions over articles and blogs – maybe it’s the policy to do so (this requires more follow-up…).

Clifinar and Live:

I am sorry to say that while Google and Yahoo have positioned real content at the top of the Clifinar search results, Live was still showing as it’s top search result for Clifinar a comment made in a blog’s guestbook. Most of the top positions were taken up by similar results with 2 blog posts and a hub towards the bottom of the 1st page.

Conclusions:

Google was the first to “dump” the empty comments and links from the top Clifinar results and to index relevant content at the top. It was also the only one to index articles in the top 10 results.

Yahoo followed Google in adding relevant content but had a strong trend (in my opinion) to prefer Web 2.0 content over other kinds.

The Live results were actually very disappointing when compared to both Google and Yahoo. I don’t know why but I expected Live to be better than Yahoo. I guess I was wrong.