Is Competition in the Search World a Good Thing?

If you’ve been following my posts this week, you’ll see that search engines are a main topic this week – namely because we went from basically a monopoly in the search engine industry (ie Google) to an almost equal (51%/43%) split between Google & Yahoo. MSN will soon be releasing their new search technology, and given Microsoft’s track record for dumping a lot of money into improving their market share, we can only assume MSN will become a fairly large player as well. So will we get a 33% split between the 3 companies in the upcoming year? And what will this mean for those of us trying to optimize our sites to get top search placements?

There’s been an ongoing argument about this on HighRankings.com about whether competition is good for the industry. From the industry perspective, monopoly is rarely good, and competition usually means companies lean towards innovation to differentiate themselves.

From a search engine marketer perspective, however, one wonders how much money this is going to cost advertisers… Previously, your focus was optimizing for Google, which was basically free to get in (ie editorial content) or you paid for adwords placement (sponsored listings). Sure, you could pay to be included in Inktomi or the Yahoo directory or a number of others, but you knew if you were good with Google, you’d be good with Yahoo & AOL (ie about 80% of all search results).

Now, Yahoo’s playing by a different game. They spent last year acquiring Inktomi and Overture (who previously acquired AltaVista and AllTheWeb) and now are in the process of integrating the databases (or so we speculate right now – Yahoo’s not talking). Microsoft wants in on the $7.2 billion search advertising market as well…

So where does that leave local businesses who just want to make sure their site shows up in the top of search results? In particular, does this mean advertisers will be shelling out even more money to get their site listed? Yahoo currently offers a listing in their directory for $299/year. Inktomi offers inclusion in theirs for $39/year (for 1st URL). Will Yahoo & partners’ search results now weight those who pay higher than those who don’t? Or will they strive to compete with Google for high quality editorial content? Will optimization best practices work across all search engines? And will AOL continue to partner with Google or work with one of the others? Yahoo already has a wide user base of registered users that it can market to… MSN has DEEP pockets. Where will Google be at the end of this fight? (There is speculation that they will go public soon, but that hasn’t been confirmed yet.)

The answers don’t seem to be straightforward at this point… but you can see why there’s been so much buzz. In general, if your site doesn’t show up in the top 2-3 pages of search results (and hopefully you’re on the 1st page), searchers won’t find your site. That was bad for sites that Google gave low rankings to because their site didn’t show up in 80% of search results. Now maybe they may have a fighting chance to get into other directories. For example, Google’s last update (Florida) that hit in November sent lots of sites who were in the top 10 out of the top 100 – for no apparent reason. This was devastating for many businesses who were used to relying on free traffic from Google. They now had to rely on Pay For Placement campaigns to ensure a top position (but now in the sponsored links section). Spreading out the market share means a change to one search engine algorithm will have less impact on overall site traffic.

So there are good points and bad points here…

Random Posts