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Cherry-picking search engines

Posted by admin on January 25, 2007 in SEO Theory

People complain that about 80% of their traffic comes from Google. Anyone who understands basic marketing principles realizes that the more productive sources of traffic you have, the better off you are. That’s why I only allow Google to drive 20% of my traffic. I can live without Google. How about you?

Okay, most people don’t feel they have the resources to relegate Google to a small corner of their marketing plan. But I disagree. The only difference between me and you is that I have figured out how not to be dependent upon Google. Okay, I create a lot of content. But if you only have a 5-page Web site, you can still create content no matter how poorly you write or how busy you are.

But what do you do once you have all that content in place? How do you make Google less important to your marketing plan without sacrificing Google traffic? I mean, I’ll take 20,000 Google referrals a month if I can get them. Why not? I’m just saying I don’t want 80,000 of my monthly 100,000 visitors to come from Google.

I leaerned a long time ago that building referrals from a search engine can be as simple as working the search engine into your content. I proved the concept with an engine called WhatUSeek. Never heard of it? They sold out and left me high and dry.

Still, for a couple of years WhatUSeek was one of my leading search referral sources. All I did was use their service to index my Web sites and placed their search box on all my pages. Sadly, I’m still removing that dead and broken code from obscure pages today. But I won’t digress into my disgraceful need for a real content management system.

My point is that by using a third-party tool as my site search I was able to build additional traffic — call it temporarily sticky traffic — by encouraging new visitors to search my content. They stayed around longer, visited more pages, and generally appreciated my sites more.

Through the years I’ve experimented with other search tools. They all get used. But the problem is that none of them really do a good job of indexing a Web site. Today I have three custom search engines from Google that see varying use. But I’m not using Google for site search.

The problem with Google, as with all the major search engines, is that it doesn’t place all my pages into its index. And, worse, now you can only offer Google Custom Search — which doesn’t use the Supplemental Results Index. I’d like to have the option to include Supplemental Results, but I don’t want to have to include them. But right now CSE is not useful for sites that are mostly Supplemental. Google, you shot yourself in the foot with that trick.

I’ve often had to twist the search box rules to get all the domains in my network into a unified search tool, but even then it was awkward. Still, when I’ve placed search boxes from Google, Yahoo!, and other services on my network, people have used them. So I was actually able to build up my Yahoo! referrals by using a Yahoo! search box on a few pages.

When I wanted to update my content with WhatUSeek, all I had to do was tell it to respider my pages. Now, I could maybe invest money in a Google search appliance, but that sidesteps the issue. Google does not index all of my pages. Nor does Windows Live Search. Nor does Ask.

Yahoo! does a pretty good job of deep-crawling large content sites but their results pages are so ugly — and controlling which content they index and display is impossible — that their service is virtually useless. I’ve tried to use it but it’s just too inflexible.

And Yahoo! takes so long to update its database anyway that for 1-2 months after a major change, their search results won’t match my actual content.

I miss the old free WhatUSeek service. I wish I could have it back, with all its flaws and limitations. But I digress.

If you can live with ugly, put a Yahoo! search box on your site. Your Yahoo! referrals will increase. The value of sending people to Yahoo! to search your content is that you’ll train them to use a different search engine to find what you can provide them.

Of course, you only want to use Yahoo! if and only if:

1) Yahoo! actually indexes more of your content than Google or Live.

2) You’re not getting much traffic from Yahoo! to begin with.

Windows Live Search is a disappointment because as aggressively as it crawls sites, it just doesn’t seem to report the full depth of my content. Besides which, their site search service (as described) is just too limited and inflexible.

Still, if you want more traffic from Live Search, then put it on your site.

You can also offer direct links to specific queries on various search services. But good luck getting Ask to index your site.

Windows Live does a better job of finding references to ask.com on SEO Theory. Of course, I’m not sure I want to see pages come up just because I’ve listed something in my blogroll. Sadly, a more realistic search for experiment evaluate adjust leaves Live looking a bit dead and empty.

Google reports 7 references to experiment evaluate adjust on SEO Theory. Yahoo! doesn’t index this blog very well. Shame on you, Yahoo! I just talked you up.

Seeding Web content with search queries that favor your content was once a favorite link-building trick. But people never really stopped to consider that it actually has a much more impressive value (and, so far as I have been able to determine, linking to query results has only sporadic success in building link love). When you teach your visitors to search your site first you impress upon them the value of your content.

Furthermore, you can teach them the queries you want them to use to find your content. It’s a win-win option as far as the people who are looking for what you have are concerned. They’ll find it with a little help from you and one or more search engines. There is no reason for you to sit and wait for people to find your site through search engine Y when you know they are finding you through search engine G. You can teach people new search tricks.

Of course, some people would be concerned about falsely reporting to themselves referrals that they redirected through a secondary search engine. But understand that the only people who are likely to use a search box to navigate your site are the people who did not find what they were looking for.

That concept doesn’t always sink in with many Webmasters. They only look at the fact that they are sending people away. Yeah. Too bad. Those people are going to leave anyway. At least with a search box you have a shot at influencing them to not only come back, but to come back to a page where you have a better change of producing a conversion.

The question is, which search engine is most likely to produce that convertible traffic for you? You need to be diligent in checking your coverage with whatever search engine you use for your third-party on-site search tool. Or maybe you just want to buy the software they offer. Me, I’m cheap.

Then again, I already get thousands of visitors each month from the various search services. I guess it comes down to what you’re looking for that you don’t already have, and how much it means to you.