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How many search engines are in your SEO world?

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 14, 2007 in SEO Theory

There was a fair amount of screaming and hollaring in various SEO forums last week, which usually signals an update (or “data push”) from Google. Lots of rankings were lost. Perhaps a large number of sites also dropped out of the Main Web Index and “went Supplemental”.

Oh well. Updates/data pushes happen.

After 8 or 9 years, these minor downturns in search engine referrals take on a different perspective (just for the record, I can’t tell if it has affected my personal sites — Google only sends me a fraction of my traffic). In any event, you have to understand that if you lose your rankings today and if they stay lost for the next 30 days, you still have the rest of the future to do something about that.

It’s not like you’ll go out of business just because you lost your Google placements.

Of, if it is like you’ll go out of business, then you did something wrong. You put all your eggs into the Google basket, and Google is by no means the only game in town.

A lot of people agonize over Google because it serves more queries than any other search engine. Frankly, I think that is a major red flag. They don’t get that many more people than anyone else. It’s just that Google users keep running queries. Why? What are they searching for?

According to various search industry metrics, Google handled around 3.5 billion searches in February 2007 (or about 2/3 of all searches made). You may be thinking that’s where the money is, but frankly the odds of your pulling any significant portion of those queries are closer to zero than they are to one.

In March 2007, Google served about 3.8 billion queries, again amounting to about 2/3 of all estimated queries.

I personally get 20-30,000 referrals from Google per month for my personal sites. Actually, it may be more. I just hate adding up all the little numbers from secondary data centers and for my less well-known domains. So let’s just say I get 25,000 referrals from Google each month.

Anyone who watches my publicly announced statistics knows that is the lion’s share of my reported search referrals. But I still track traffic from Yahoo! and Live Search. I’d love to track traffic from AOL and Ask but some months they don’t even hit the radar. Still, my 25,000 referrals from Google per month amount to something like 0.00000658% of all Google queries.

Yahoo! serves over 1 billion queries per month. I wouldn’t mind getting 0.00000658% of that traffic. I actually don’t do so well on Yahoo! as I do on Google.

Microsoft served over 600 million queries in February and over 700 million queries in March. I’ll take 0.00000658% of that action. How about you? You really want to turn down 4700 referrals a month?

Maybe like me you’re not doing as well on Yahoo! and Microsoft as you are doing on Google. Life could be worse. But my point is that someone is getting a lot of referrals from Yahoo! and Live. Maybe you get 20,000 referrals from Yahoo! and only 1,000 referrals from Google.

Until it drops completely off the radar, the number of queries a search engine serves has no real place in any realistic search engine optimization strategy. If Ask is serving 130 million queries per month, that’s more than enough for me. I’ll gladly accept 855 referrals. That’s about twice what I actually get from them. Come on, Ask. My pages are more reliable and informative than Ickipedia’s. Give me top billing for a while.

Okay, maybe 900 referrals a month doesn’t sound like a lot to those of you who are used to getting 50,000 referrals a month from Google. So just close your browser windows and leave me here with the rest of the people would would love to 900 referrals from Ask.

It’s true that you want to focus your optimization efforts where they’ll achieve the most return on your investment. But it seems that everyone feels they should be getting equally large slices from Google’s pie. I’d love to get 25,000 referrals from Yahoo! every month. In fact, if that happened, I wouldn’t miss Google if they decided to ditch my pages.

And lately I have been giving thought to why I only track a fraction of Google’s referrals through Yahoo!. I’ve improved my placements enough to see the ratio drop from 10-to-1 to 6-to-1. Depending on whose metrics you trust (and, frankly, I don’t trust any of them) I should be getting anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 as many referrals from Yahoo! as I get from Google.

But I don’t. Through the first 2 weeks of May I’ve received about 1/6 as many referrals from Yahoo! as from Google. Of course, if Google lost all my pages right now I’d still be okay — I get enough traffic from bookmarks, other search services, and referrals from other sites that I know people would still visit my network.

But while I continue to invest in relationships with other sites and other search services, I see an alarming number of people complaining about not getting as much traffic from Google as from Yahoo! and Live. All I can say is, someone has to get more traffic from those sites than from Google. Be glad you do have that traffic.

Search engine optimization only fails if it doesn’t improve results from any of the major search engines. That is, in order to be successful, you only need to improve your referrals from any one of the Big Five (AOL, Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo!). And if it makes you feel any better, I get fewer referrals from AOL than from Ask, even though AOL virtually replicates Google’s database.

What does that tell you about the demographics of search services?

Your measure of search referral success should only be determined in how many referrals you get overall, not in how many referrals you get from Google. If your overall referrals improve, you’re doing well. If your overall referrals hit your traffic projectings, you’re doing great.

You shouldn’t care where that traffic comes from just as long as it comes from somewhere. Sometimes, people just don’t search for what you have to offer on Google. So expecting Google to send you that traffic is unrealistic.

Do you see competitors in Google chasing your queries? Have you ever stopped to consider they may not be getting any more referrals than you? Just because you never rank on Google doesn’t mean it’s worth ranking on Google. I rank first for “zimmerman tolkien movie” on Google. So far this month I’ve received one visitor looking for that expression.

It won’t kill me if someone knocks me out of first place for it.

Don’t worry. I’ve got thousands more top rankings on Google like that one. And if my pages don’t rank well on Google for some of those obscure expressions, then logic says they must be doing a bangup job on some other search service.

The vast majority of my search referrals do actually come from obscure expressions. Yes, I rank for some “money” expressions. The best ones bring in thousands of referrals per month. But that performance quickly drops off to hundreds, then dozens, then a few.

I don’t know where all that traffic comes from. There are meta search engines in my referrals like Mamma, Dogpile, and Ixquick. I still get traffic from Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Exalead, and world-of-newave.info. Even Hakia has sent me a little bit of traffic. Hey, I must be doing something right.

Would I like to get more traffic from those services? Sure. But there are just too many queries for me to analyze them all. If nothing else, I know I have coverage in other search services. The good news for me is, if people get tired of Google, I’ve already got my foot in a few other doors.

How about you?

If you lost your rankings on Google recently, are you still getting traffic from other sources? If not, then you really have your work cut out for you. That’s what real search engine optimization is all about.