Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves gain against Google

According to the study, Google is still number one in the search industry, followed by Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves and Lycos.

Yahoo and MSN have made significant gains against Google since their last survey. Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves also saw a notable increase in their standing in the Keynote Future Usage Index, which measures the likelihood of consumers to use a search site as their primary search tool and to return to the site in the future.

The index also measures a user’s likelihood to recommend a search site to others or to use a search toolbar offered by the site.

Since the last study, Yahoo has boosted the number of users who said they would consider the site as their primary search engine by more than 20% and MSN by almost 30%. More than 81% of Yahoo users and 61% of MSN users said they would return to those sites in the future.

These numbers support recent comScore findings that indicate that Google’s lead in the search engine market is diminishing.

What does this mean to your search engine optimization activities?

AltaVista, Excite and Webcrawler all have been the hottest search engine until a new player took the lead. Although it doesn’t seem that this will happen to Google soon, you shouldn’t concentrate your search engine optimization activities on Google alone.

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It’s the worst nightmare of every webmaster, your site gets hacked. That’s really bad for you as a webmaster but also for your search engine rankings. But Google can help you get back in the high search engine results pages again.

In early may there was some kind of backdoor in the shared server of my hosting company. Because of this backdoor a javascript changed all the index pages of every website on the server. There were placed hidden links on every index page of every website on the server.

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Many webmasters overlook an important part of search engine optimization: if you over-optimize your web pages, chances are that your website rankings might drop because your site has been designed for search engines and not for web surfers.

Is your website over-optimized?

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Getting high rankings on Google is so important for the success of a website that some webmasters try anything to get on Google’s first result page.

Unfortunately, many of the methods that promise high search engine rankings are basically spam. Google doesn’t like spam at all and if Google finds out that your website contains spam elements, your website will be penalized.

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