Quiddity! - the SEO Blog

Ah, the blogging desire slips, then comes back again, and I return; a stronger, more svelte incarnation of my former self. Ladies, form an orderly queue please.

Actually, I lied, I've just been busy of late, and horror of horrors, allowed this blog to slip. Now I was a once a week person as it was, but when once a week slides into once a month then alarm bells start to ring and you know you're in trouble, regardless of what else is going on.

So I have taken the time out to return here and continue to venture tentatively into the realms of all that is social media, SEO, and blogging.

As I was innocently mooching through my feed reader this fine day, I came across this post: How bad is Yahoo and Live Search Traffic in the UK? from David Eaves at SEOCo. Edit: This post has been removed

His post showed the search engine referral stats over the past 30 days for his site and also Patrick Altoft's Blogstorm.

These stats only reinforce the argument that in the UK, optimising for anything other than Google is a waste of time.

Google rules the market for search engine traffic globally and on these shores they've pretty much hammered the final nail into the ramshackle coffins of what were once fine, upstanding pillars of the search engine fraternity. To be fair, when was the last time somebody asked you to make them number 1 in MSN search? So we optimise for Google, and any other referrals are seen as a bonus, though the chances are they'll have come from an international source.

But what puzzles me is the fact that the search results for Yahoo and MSN (is it worth mentioning Ask?) are so damned erratic. I used to hear that if you optimised with Google in mind then the other search engines would follow, but this clearly isn't the case. A single link can see a tremendous difference in rankings on these other search engines, and rankings have a peculiar habit of bouncing up and down, sometimes dropping at a tremendous rate in the space of two weeks.

Google rankings, however, tend to build steadily.

Another thing I've noticed on an overall basis is that as the Google rankings increase, Yahoo's seem to slip away. Maybe it's just me. Who knows?

All I can say is, for the UK at least, concentrate on Google as your source of search engine traffic. The other search engines took their eye off the ball for too long and should be wheeled out to pasture so they can enjoy their twilight years in comfort, reminiscing amongst themselves on past glories and how it used to be.

What do you think? Let me know with a tasty comment or two.