Different techniques for optimizing for Yahoo! and Google

You may think that in the world of SEO what works for Google works for Yahoo!, after all they’re both search engines with a primary purpose to serve up relevant results to the end user. However, not only do the same techniques not work for both, the algorithms of the two biggest search engines on the planet are often at odds with each other.

This means that you could quite conceivably attain #1 in Yahoo! for all of your chosen keywords yet find yourself languishing on page 10 of Google, or vice versa, as what is Yahoo!’s ambrosia is Google’s poison. I could have used the analogy of what is one search engine’s trash is another search engine’s treasure, but I didn’t want to suggest that Yahoo! treasures what Google considers trash. It does. I just didn’t want to suggest it.

I’m now going to show you how to avoid the pitfalls of performing in one search engine, while struggling in another while I highlight the major differences in the algorithms; basically, how to get results in both Google and Yahoo!

Note: I’m not bothering with MSN as that’s less of a search engine and more of a random website generator.

The first major difference in the two algorithms is that Yahoo! seems to prefer pages with a higher amount of textual content than Google. Studies have shown that sites on Yahoo!’s first page tend to have 28% more text than the pages found on Google for the same search. Approximate figures put the ideal Yahoo! word count at around 1,300 compared to Google’s 950. I’m not suggesting that you specifically edit or pad your text to hit those totals in order to rank, but they can be used as a guide for content on your homepage. If you have 200 words on your homepage, it’s not enough; if you have 5,000 words consider breaking your page up into several different pages.

The word count then relates to keyword density. SEOs and even SEO companies disagree on the optimum keyword density for web pages, but they don’t all realise that different search engines prefer different densities. Yahoo! seems to show preference to websites with a much higher keyword density than Google, with studies showing Google’s preference leans towards a density of 2% whereas Yahoo! was at 2.8%. Of course this is relative to word count, and as Yahoo! prefers web pages with more text the keyword count is comparatively higher also. It is believed that you can rise to as high as 7% – 8% keyword density for Yahoo!, but this could pose a problem for Google as densities that high can be treated as spam and result in a penalty. It’s advisable therefore not to exceed 3% for your density in order to appeal to both search engines.

You can avoid this however by using combinations of your keywords, or plurals as Yahoo! counts them as one example whereas Google does not. For example, if you wanted to optimise for “Men’s Clothing” you can use that exact term for Google and hit the magic 2% density mark, but also add in uses of the phrase in the following styles to make the density appear much higher for Yahoo!: “Mens Clothing” and “Mens’ Clothing”.

Another major difference between the two is Google’s preference given to links isn’t shared by Yahoo! A large part of Google’s algorithm is its linking, which is measured in the infamous Page Rank (something that webmasters and some SEOs chase like it was the Holy Grail, but just like the Holy Grail – attaining it doesn’t mean you’ll live forever). While Page Rank alone is not a significant factor in your ranking, the linking strength the Page Rank demonstrates is. Until recently you were able to rank in Google for phrases that were not even present on your website. This was famously labelled the ‘Google Bomb’ and was used to comedic effect by webmasters when Google displayed George Bush’s page on the official Whitehouse website as the number one result in its index for a search on ‘Miserable Failure’.

Although this bomb has now been diffused by Google, the principals behind it are still true, meaning the anchor text used in links is very significant for Google and less so for Yahoo! Notice the #1 result in Google for ‘Click Here’? Yahoo! has very different results as the millions of web pages that link to Adobe’s Acrobat Reader download page aren’t sufficient to push it to #1 in Yahoo!, the on page factors prove decisive.

This difference in Yahoo! means that link text alone is not enough to gain results; instead you need to concentrate on your on page content.

Yahoo! recently admitted to using a tag called robots-nocontent, which when placed around content on a page tells Yahoo! to ignore the text for ranking purposes. What this allows you to do is to filter out text such as navigation, copyright text or external RSS feeds from Yahoo!, thus increasing the density of your keyword text on the page. Currently Google does not use this tag, so by increasing your Yahoo! density you shouldn’t be harming your Google density.

This tag was added to one of Just Search’s client’s websites recently as their Yahoo! rankings were underperforming compared to their Google rankings. The reason for the poor rankings in Yahoo! was that an RSS feed was being displayed on the homepage pulled from an external website that contained around 40% of the page’s text. This feed contained none of the chosen keywords for the website, so was severely bringing down the density of the relevant keywords, which Yahoo! prefers to be very high.

This chart demonstrates the effect of the change. It’s not hard to see when the code was added to the site as we were able to transform their listing from around the 50 mark to number 1!

It was of course also important that the Google ranking was unaffected by the edit, which held firm at 4/5. Had we simply removed the RSS feed the density would have been too high for Google, and could have potentially caused penalties for spam.

I don’t envisage Google will ever use this tag in the same way Yahoo! are using it because the potential for abuse is very high. Webmasters and less professional SEOs could use it to display different content to web surfers as they do to the search engines. Google wouldn’t be able to maintain its excellent relevant results if webmasters could serve up pages that appeared through the Title, Meta, Anchor Text and Body Text to be about one thing, and then completely transformed into something else by having a huge amount of different text appear to the user, hidden from the Spiders with a robots-nocontent tag.

It should be noted that even though Yahoo! will ignore content that is placed inside the robots-nocontent tag, it will still follow links within the tag.

So if you’re wondering why you rank well in Yahoo! but are struggling to get results in Google, or maybe you’re front page of Google but Yahoo! doesn’t know you exist, some of the reasons highlighted here could be contributing factors. Remember that both search engines like different things, opposing things in many cases and appeasing them both requires attention to detail rather than compromise.

Darren
SEO Programmer

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3 Comments

1. A question - does the keyword density mentioned in your post (2% Google and 2.8% Yahoo) include the meta text?

   Or does it just refer to the page content that the customer sees?

   Comment by smithcn August 6, 2007 @ 12:28 pm

2. The density just refers to on-page content, meta text is completely seperate from this example.

   It’s important to note as well that the percentages are just guides, averages based on the researched data. They’re not something to aim for as such as there is no magic number. Yahoo! does prefer it to be much higher though, making Yahoo! somewhat easier to gain results from.

   Comment by DarrenJamieson August 6, 2007 @ 2:47 pm

3. Great post Darren thanks Darren. I’m experiencing excellent Yahoo rankings at the moment and it’s so frustrating!

   Comment by Louise Gorrie September 22, 2008 @ 9:53 am

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