Search Engine Market Share
The latest numbers have been released by qSearch and they are as follows:
Google: 36.8%
Yahoo!: 26.6%
MSN: 14.5%
AOL: 12.8%
Excite: 4.3%
Ask Jeeves: 1.8%
InfoSpace: 1.3%
Lycos: 0.8%
Others: 1.1%
The biggest surprise is the comeback by Excite. For an engine that is dead and is displaying Overture only results, the market share is very impressive. Google still commands half of the market with AOL’s share, and Microsoft continues to slip.
Keyword Meta Tag Importance
I am asked from time to time how important is the keyword meta tag in ranking. I advised clients back in June of 2000 to stop using the keyword meta tag due to it was actually hurting ranking in AltaVista (which had a large share of the market at the time). Now, most major engines ignore it, but Yahoo! reads it, so I am advising to use it, but to keep the tag small and focused on generic keywords, as you don’t want to advertise to your competitors the highly targeted keyword phrases you are going after.
I started to wonder just how important it really was, so I started going through the main pages of Yahoo! itself and looking at the source code. I have gone through well over 100 pages and I have yet to find a page in Yahoo! that uses the keyword meta tag. I can’t find one!
Finding True Backlinks from Google
Thanks to Bruce Clay for pointing out this tip at the Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this past week. When doing a search for backlinks, instead of using the toolbar or the site:webmarketingnow.com command, use the following: .webmarketingnow. – site: www.webmarketingnow.com (simply substitute your domain for mine and you will get accurate results). Using the backward links option 117 links display, but using the search string above 730 are revealed.
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