All this reshuffling among search engines has a huge effect on ordinary Web sites, many of which depend on traffic referred to them by Google and Yahoo. Yahoo threw a monkey wrench into holiday marketing budgets at thousands of commercial sites when it demoted its directory virtually overnight and replaced it with Google's listings. Sites accustomed to being the first displayed when people searched for a particular phrase, such as "radio-controlled cars," got quite a shock.
"We had one partner who had worked hard to get the top listing on Yahoo for the phrase 'pay phones.' One day we woke up, and the listing had dropped off the face of the earth," recalled Flint McGlaughlin, who runs an Internet research firm called MarketingExperiments.com.
Another firm McGlaughlin does research for, TechSavings.com, said it nearly quadrupled sales this year, to $4 million a month, by paying for placement in comparison shopping engines such as DealTime.com and PriceGrabber.com. The Gainesville, Fla., computer parts distributor said it also spent more than $13,000 last month to appear in Google's paid listings.
Jeff Greenfield, who sells a search engine tool called PositionSolutions, said companies doing well on the Internet typically spend money on both paid search listings and professional help spiffing up their sites to appeal to search engine "robots" that index the Web.
Google's secret sauce -- the mathematical formula it uses to rank each Web page -- relies heavily on how many other Web pages link to it, but that's only one of more than 100 variables it considers in determining relevance.
Google has 50 PhDs on staff who tinker with the formula almost daily. They are constantly trying to foil marketers who use tricks, such as creating fake "doorway" pages to fool robots. Google purges from its index sites it catches breaking its rules, which forbid the use of doorways and similar tricks.
"It requires more work to take shortcuts on Google now, and we have definitely seen a shrinking in the number of people doing unethical search engine marketing," said Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer.
Article courtesy of YellowBrix, Inc.
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