Over the past 6 months, ever since MSN really entered the search space, SEOs have now began talking about optimizing differently for each search engine algorithm. Back in the old days, there used to be a handful of search engines that people had to worry about. Then there was just Google, really. But not it is more diverse - we have four search algorithms to worry about. We have Google, we have Yahoo, we have MSN and we have Ask.com, which is increasing share each day.
ProjectPHP, Cre8asite Forum administrator, started a thread named Do Search Engines Use One Algorithm For All Results? The obvious answer to me is no, they all use different engines. But what you typically find these days are that people have one optimization strategy for MSN and Yahoo and then an other optimization strategy for Google. So how do you work that? You can cloak - oh no you can't! You can build different sites for different engines. Work different pages or subdirectories of your site for different engines. Or you can pay them al off. :)
But seriously, the thread gets into the heads of what is going on today, in the trenches of SEO. If I tweak for engine X, will that hurt my rankings on engine Z? Do you believe all engines share the same algorithm? I don't. Do you?
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
