Google vs Yahoo vs Bing - Who can explain it?

[shockwave]

Organic SEO ....let's say a website.

I want to believe that SEO is the same across the board, but if you subscribe to that theory, what explains the different rankings in the SERPs?

Does anyone have any special techniques they apply for optimizing in one search engine but not the other? Or do you do it the same across the board?

Clearly they must use different algorithms and certainly the amount of competition (indexed) are obvious explanations, but I'm looking for something more.

Thoughts?

[David Keith]

first, all the algorithms are somewhat secretive.

naturally google's is the most talked about and tested. but you know who else watches the #1 search engine like a hawk.... yahoo and bing. google even has a lawsuit that i think is still active accusing bing of stealing their results and using the google results as part of the bing algorithm.

google is where the traffic is...thats no secret. if you optimize for google you will be fine. basically just do all the normal seo stuff.

[shockwave]

Originally Posted by owslaw123

google is where the traffic is...thats no secret. if you optimize for google you will be fine. basically just do all the normal seo stuff.

Hi owslaw,

Yes, that is what I currently do. And yet, there are typically different results between the 3. Sometimes not much, sometimes there are huge differences.

Just curious what others have found.

[UMS]

Yahoo/Bing results will generally be quite similar as they share a lot of the same data.

However, they usually differ quite considerably (for me at least) with Google results. After all, they are trying to differentiate themselves from Google, so they are obviously going to use a different approach to how sites are ranked.