Nov 23, 2007
I had one of the best laughs of my life recently while reading a page explaining what Google's homepage would look like if they had to SEO their site like everyone else.It was beautiful, and I'm so jealous I didn't think of it first.
So with that funny story firmly planted in my mind, we got an enquiry at SearchMasters coming from the search term "search engine". Because we are optimised for "search engine optimisation", by default we are optimised for "search engine" as well.
As I normally do, I went out and scoped out the SERPS to see what was happening...
Above: SearchMasters outranks google.co.nz for the term "search engine"
Outranked!
Funny how SearchMasters and others are beating Google for this phrase. Maybe if Google applied some of the SEO suggestions recommended in the above link, they could rank top for this term :)Clearly there isn't any bias being applied here - Google's homepage isn't optimised for this term, and it's not ranking top as a result. Great to know we are (at least sometimes) operating on a level playing field.
Update
So after thinking it through, I thought it a little unfair to pick on Google over this one, so I decided to check out Yahoo and MSN as well.
Nuff said really. Out of the 3 major engines, Google is ranking itself best. Even Yahoo is listing Google as the first result, which says all kinds of things really. I kept these results to NZ only for consistency with the original Google result, but upon thinking about it, MSN probably doesn't have a NZ site and could well be filtering itself out of the results. Yahoo on the other hand is branded as Yahoo Xtra, so one would assume this is a New Zealand site, or at least it should be.
If you search the worldwide versions of these phrases, you get all kinds of funny results. MSN lists every major search engine you can think of, except itself, on the top 10 results.
4 Comments
Hehe, of course. It doesn't really make sense to use a search engine to search for a search engine.
This isn't meant to be a dig at the SEs, just a bit of fun :)
I had another good laugh at this one, one thing that always interests me, is when google updates it the PR worldwide, I always check what googles PR is, it bonces between PR9 and PR10 all the time, really good to know it loses a point every now and then. Considering how many links it has just for adsence alone, any guesses what website would have more links to itself?
:)
Must share a story, last night I lost a potiental seo client cause he googled the word "SEO" and since none of our sites were on the first 2 pages, he decided to spend his $800 SEO budget elsewhere. (he didn't mention what google he used, but doesn't really matter, I'm sure I wasn't in any of the for just "SEO", unfortunately I spend more time on my clients site, making sure they rank as well as they can, and am far to busy doing that to even consider trying to make our site rank highly for a single word) but was worth the laugh I got reading the email.
It really made me wonder though, what some people really expect their SEO dollar, do some people really expect that their $800 SEO budget will get them ranking for every possible search?? makes you wonder huh...
Lynny
All those Adsense links pointing towards Google don't count because they are rendered using Javascript. I think the fluctuating pagerank between 9 and 10 is Google's way of telling us that they aren't giving themselves special treatment.
Guesses as to which website would have more links than Google? I'd guess that Wikipedia, W3C, Digg and Youtube all had more links than Google. But who knows.
I think perhaps that not ranking higher than other search engines is little more than embarrassment here.
It would be a bigger deal if the user were not already searching for something using a search engine.
I actually like the thought of Google coming in further down on the list. It's a welcome sign that they're not unwarrantably patting themselves on the back.