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Google and Yahoo search engine (similarities and differences)

The Wikipedia encyclopedia defines a search engine as, quote “A Web search engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Information may consist of web pages, images and other types of files” and also quote “A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information which must be consulted, akin to other techniques for managing information overload.

To ensure that the Google and Yahoo search engine spiders regularly visit and index your website and content you need to understand and diligently adhere to the webmaster guidelines for each of these search engines. These guidelines detail exactly what to include and what not to include in your website and in the content that you write and place onto the internet. Following these guidelines will help Google and Yahoo find, index and rank your website, webpage and related content.

Summarised below is a comparison of the webmaster guidelines detailing the similarities and differences of good and bad practices between the Google search engine and the Yahoo search engine. Remember that there are many other webmaster guidelines, which can be ‘searched for’ on Google and Yahoo that are not covered here. Although these guidelines are not covered in this summary, they all still need to be identified, studied and applied.

Similarities between Google and Yahoo Use original focussed validated keyword rich unique content.

Create content that is aimed mainly at appealing to human readers and searchers and not primarily to attract the search engine spiders.

Create all links with the initial aim of helping people find interesting content instead of prompting and exciting the search engine spiders.

All validated keywords used in the title, Meta tag, Meta tag description and content to accurately describe the content of the website.

Avoid creating web pages and websites that result in the search engine spiders not being able to index those pages. These include ‘dynamic’ and ‘static’ pages.

Stay away from creating “doorway” pages that are specifically aimed to attract the search engine spiders and that point the searcher to another website or web page. These pages are commonly knows as “doorway pages”.

Do not compile multiple websites and or web pages that contain the same content. This is viewed negatively as ‘duplicate content’.

Be very careful not to create a website or page that contains an excessive amount of content or a large number of links that have been specifically created to point to another website or web page, like an affiliate site.

Keep away from compiling pages that use an automated process to generate large volumes of similar content that is of no value.

Do not use unauthorised computer programs to automatically check website and web page rankings and that automatically submit pages to falsely boost related search engine rankings.

Refrain from presenting content to the search engine spiders that differs from the content viewed by the user in their web browsers. This ‘black hat’ search engine optimization technique is known as ‘cloaking’.

Abstain from using text or links that are hidden from the user. This is often done by changing the font colour of the text or links to make them invisible in the content of the website or web page.

Do not get involved with linking schemes or practice linking strategies that are mainly aimed at inflating the website or page’s link popularity with the sole purpose of artificially enhancing the site’s search engine rankings.

Abstain from using too many keywords and keyword phrases within the content, as well as a large number of irrelevant keywords that have no bearing on the subject discussed in the content.

Websites and web pages must not include too many pop-ups, spyware, viruses, trojans and phishing or user navigation interference.

Pages must not be misleading, deceitful or create a distasteful user experience.

Differences between Google and Yahoo Although Yahoo states that the design of your website must be generally good, Google is more specific and these specifics can be viewed as differences. These specific differences are;

Make sure that you have less than one hundred links on any web page.

The Google spider does not index or identify any text contained in logos or images.

Create a ‘sitemap’ on your website that contains links which point to all the pages of your site that users can access on your website.

Check for broken links and correct ‘html’.

Do not send automated queries to Google.

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site.

Allow search robots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since ‘http’ header.

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server as this file shows the spiders which directories to crawl.

Ensure that your content management system can export your content to help the search engine spider and index your website.

Add the robots.txt ‘html’ to the back end of your website to prevent the spiders from crawling search result pages or other auto-generated pages that do not add value for searchers.

Differences between Yahoo and Google Websites, web pages and content must not contain pointless and useless virtual hostnames.