I wrote about how Yahoo! must like me better than Google. I take it back. Yahoo! likes me for certain keywords while Google likes me for other keywords. Perhaps by comparing the differences, I can hypothesize a bit about differences in the search engine algorithms. All analysis is for www.eslgo.com
ESL: Google = 65 / Yahoo! = 32
ESL is in my title three times. Maybe Yahoo! appreciates repitition in the title more than Google. Aslo I talked about my keyword density. Maybe Yahoo! counts density more than Google.
English as a second language: Google = 18 / Yahoo! = 43
My title says "English second language" (might add the "as a"). Maybe Yahoo! is more interested in the missing "as a" than Google.
English second language: Google = 8 / Yahoo = 133
I have no idea about this one!
Teaching ESL: Google = 5 / Yahoo = 9
The closest one I tested. Also the one I spent the least time optimizing my site for because it means less traffic than a high rank for "ESL". Currently, it's not one of my meta keywords, but I think I'll add it and see what happens. They keyword density for this one is much lower, but it does appear somewhat frequently at the top (in the title, the main heading, the first paragraph). I wonder if Google emphasizes the top more than Yahoo!
Anyway, just some guesses about things that might explain this. Don't base your SEO on my guesses!
Here's an interesting tool from http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php. I ran ESLgo.com through the analyzer:
Analysis of "esl" in Page Elements
Title Found 3 time(s) in 10 words (Density: 30.00%)
Keywords Found 1 time(s) in 14 words (Density: 7.14%)
Alt Text Found 4 time(s) in 76 words (Density: 5.26%)
Link Text Found 25 time(s) in 261 words (Density: 9.58%)
Description Found 3 time(s) in 13 words (Density: 23.08%)
Comments Found 0 time(s) in 0 words (Density: 0.00%)
Headings Found 3 time(s) in 12 words (Density: 25.00%)
Bold Text Found 4 time(s) in 21 words (Density: 19.05%)
All Text Found 80 time(s) in 978 words (Density: 8.18%)
Next I'm going to see how the pages ranked ahead of me are doing...
I did a Google search for "English as a second language" and saw that ESL go.com was #18. Not bad. I should be able to crack the top ten. Then I remembered that "as" and "a" were not included in the search. That's why I changed my title from "ESL go - free English as a second language..." to "ESL go - free English second language..."
I did a search for English second language. ESL go.com is ranked #8. How odd. If "as" and "a" are not counted why are the search results for English second language and English as a second language so very different?
I use Google for all my personal searches, and I get far more traffic from Google than from Yahoo on my main site, eslgo.com (despite being ranked 29 on Yahoo! and 65 Google).
However, Yahoo has been much quicker to list my new sites. For example I just wrote about how nfl-giants.com has a page rank of 5. For the search term NY Giants news (one of the main targets) I'm number 10 in Yahoo! but nowhere to be found in Google. I was quite happy to debut with a 5 since I didn't link to it from my PR 6 eslgo.com (worried about irrelevant links). However a good page rank doesn't help if I'm not listed in any search results...
Those of you who follow my SEO and link popularity quests on this blog may have noticed that SEO-search-engine-ranking.com recently went up to page rank 6 from page rank 5. So did www.esl-blog.com, www.travel-plan-idea.com, and www.stock-market-idea.com.
I'm not quite sure how these sites earned the increased page rank. Stock-market-idea.com picked up two external links from page rank 4 sites, one of them a blog entry. ESL-blog picked up a blog entry from a PR 5 site and another entry from a PR 4 site. Possibly these counted for quite a bit because they were one way links and blog entries. Considering the time and effort involved getting my first site, eslgo.com to PR 6, I was surprised to see it happen for these sites so quickly and with so (compared to the effort I put in to eslgo.com) little effort.
www.nfl-giants.com debuted at page rank 5. www.jtrotta.com debuted at page rank 4. ESL go.com remained page rank 6 and ESL go.net remained page rank 5. A Google search for links to these sites turns up no matches, although each site does have some links. Without knowing which links Google likes I can't tell how the page rank for each was derived.
Considering my current rankings on Yahoo! and Google, it's pretty obvious that search engine rankings are determined differently, very differently. For the search term ESL, ESL go.com is #30 on Yahoo and #65 on Google.
For the search term "stock market idea", stock market idea weblog is #1 on Yahoo but nowhere to be found on Google despite its Google page rank of 5. If I could do as well on Google as I do on Yahoo! I'd be pretty happy...
It has been reported that Google treats ESL-blog as a URL with the keywords ESL and blog. ESL_blog would be one keyword, literally ESL_blog (I can't imagine anyone ever searching for that). I've written about domain names before, and they are not a huge factor but if you believe as I do that every little bit helps, use dashes not underscores in your domain names, at least for now. Google being as smart as they are should correct this seemingly dumb distinction between underscores and dashes soon (I hope).
Besides content, the biggest question relating to SEO is link partners. For example should I exchange links with different kinds of sites? The thematization question is atough one. Most large sites cover more than one theme: Is Yahoo going to be penalized for having sports and finance realted content? Is this site going ot be penalized for exchanging links with education sites?
Let's take the specific keyword ESL for example: English second language or Electronic sports league. With the current system, sites that are entirely different could potentially benefit from linking with each other. In the future, search engines may penalize links from unrelated sites. Many sites now have link categories that have nothing to do with their main key words.
Some people argue that one way links are counted more heavily than reciprocal links. This explains why buying links has become popular and why such high prices have been observed: 150-250 US/month for a link from a page rank 6 site. I ask for 110/year from my page rank 6 site and don't get it, perhaps because ESL is a "poor" keyword.
So, with only link from an external site, Blogs for learning English/teaching English has debuted with a Google page rank of 5. The one link, of course, comes from my main ESL site, ESL go.com - free English as a second language which has a page rank 6.
You would think it was safe to say that a link from a PR 6 site guarantees PR 5 but when I started An English as a second language weblog, it debuted with PR 4 even when it had a link from the same PR 6 site, ESL go.com (plus one or two others). I wrote about that a while back.
Recently, ESL go.com moved up from 65 to 62. This may have been a result of clicking. Anyway, since I started this journal of my search engine rankings, I've gone from #95 to #62 for the search term "ESL" on Google. 33 spots in 2.5 months isn't too shabby. Here's a very brief recap on what I've been doing to get these results:
SEO tip #1 - Get your keywords in the title. Putting "ESL" in the title three times (instead of one time) got me from 95 to 78 in Google search results. Some of the increase may have been the result of new incoming links however.
SEO tip #2 - When you get links, look for increased link popularity and keyword density by getting keywords in text links to your site.
Theese seem to have had the biggest effect, in addition to clicking (as mentioned above). There are other things too, which you can read about in past entries.
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