Hello,

I've been checking search engine rankings with an online tool and received some results I can't explain, but wish to understand.

For example the website, using the keywords 'education supplies uk', gets the following results:

Google: #2
Yahoo! Search: No - Not in top 50
MSN: No - Not in top 50
AOL: #2

Why is it that the site ranks so high using the Google and AOL search engine, and get such bad results using Yahoo! or MSN? How can I make the website rank better in the other search engines?

Cheers,

MJ

What is your website URL??

The Consortium - buying made easy for all your educational supplies

In general - Yahoo and MSN pay a lot more attention to the content of a site and Google (AOL's results are Googles by the way) pays more attention to links.

My first bit of advice would have been to build more content but looking at the Google cache you have thousands of site pages already. Have you created an XML site-map and submitted it to Yahoo and MSN?

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Heres a link to a post about sitemaps:

XML Sitemaps

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AOL uses Google results. Have you always ranked well in Google? Have you never ranked well in MSN and Yahoo?

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I get the opposite.
My bigjohnsamui site is top of Yahoo search for 'hotel koh samui' and on page 6 of google.

I've never figured out how to get top ranking in Google. If anyone can tell me how I'd love to know!

Ree.
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>checking search engine rankings with an online tool

Is there a free tool that will do this? If so what is the URL? Thanks!

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AOL = Google search results and there can be various reasons why it goes good in Google and not in the other 2. Yahoo is generally slow, MSN has very different ranking logic.

Also,.. are you sure it's all the correct local versions of the engines?

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Is this SPAM?

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Lol, yeah that's what I thought at first too. But actually it's the thread starter replying to somebody asking what his site is.

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Simple. The rules are different for the different engines. Yahoo is a pay deal and it loves keywords in Title tags. MSN re-uses the yahoo data. So, one thing I do is buy my domain name through yahoo and host it where ever. because I am paying monthly, yahoo and therefore MSN likes me.

Also Yahoo pays attention to the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag.

Google likes total keyword density, img alt tags, bold, h1 and h2 tags.

All of them like inbound-only links but google is more finicky about duplicate remote anchor text and non-relevant remote content for inbounds.

MSN re-using Yahoo's data...You are kidding right?

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There is nothing strange in it.
Do onpage optimization well. optimize Alt, and submit sitemap in MSN and Yahoo. it will start ranking well in both two as well

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Google is able to filter out spam & black-hat linking more effectively (ok, they still suck), while Yahoo and MSN seem more vulnerable to these tactics.

It sounds like you're doing things right (for Google), but not quite spammy enough to compete in Yahoo/MSN.

Stick w/ what you're doing and don't be tempted to start spamming. Eventually, you'll start ranking in all 3 sites.

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I guess u are lucky that it is not vice versa. Especially on MSN u have sometimes not explainable Rankings (could mean u never get even into the index and have no clue why). Yahoo is sometimes slow as mentioned before, u should submit a xml-sitemap to the webmaster tools of Google, Yahoo and MSN - so u can check the analysis tools there and find out if you have any problems.

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This is the best bit of advice you've received so far. If you're doing well on Google then why bother "rocking the boat".

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I believe a sitemap has been submitted, I'll re-check that.

To my knowledge the site has never ranked well in either Yahoo or MSN.

I've tried multiple free tools, mind that they are not all very good tools. For me the results always gave general poor ranking in Yahoo and MSN, and good results in google. You can easily find tools via search engines, but here you go:
SEOcompany
MMT

I've tested ranking in UK versions of Yahoo and MSN, the results are truly poor

No spam, sorry about that, my bad.

Cheers, I'll look into these things to try and make improvements where I can.
I'll run some SEO tests during the coming month to see if the ranking improves.

Thank you all for the quick and helpful replies, I feel the love !

Tho I'm quite happy with the ranking on Google, I believe Yahoo and MSN are still popular search engines so I don't want to miss out.

Well Aol follow the Google search result and which technology Google using that is different from yahoo or msn so i think different technology and different search result.

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I would look into where your traffic is coming from and then determine how you need to beef up your SEO. Personally I get very little traffic from Yahoo! so I don't really worry about them.

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MJW,

Are you sure you have an XML sitemap? Cant find one with the usual sitemap.xml file name?

There seams to be some issue with the passing of page rank through your site as well. All the other pages that i checked had 0 toolbar PR. This may be an issue with your menu. There is a lot of javascript in the menu code which is not best practice.

Setup the xml sitemap (there's loads of advice online but Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps is the easiest option), submit it to Google, ping yahoo and msn then add it to your robots.txt file using this line of code:

Add a standard domain sitemap as well.

Your domain is ten years old. In that time have you employed any bad practices? Keyword stuffing, hidden text etc...? This may have caused penalties in Y and MSN but Google may have missed them. I would appreciate other members thoughts on this.

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Here you will find the sitemap currently in use: http://www.theconsortium.co.uk/sitem...m_products.xml

With a sitemap it shouldnt matter that the site uses javascript in it's navigation? I do agree that these should be in HTML.
I've not been working on the site for very long, tho I'm quite sure there has never been any type of blackhat SEO or any other bad practices.

I'll update everything and resubmit the sitemap.

Cheers

It does matter what kind of navigation you use. The xml site map is not meant to be used to find pages, only to tell which pages you have in your website. But if they can't find a page by crawling the site, they won't index it.

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So I supose the best course of action is to alter or re-make the navigation in such a way the a crawler will find its way.
I don't think the site will be in re-design anytime soon, I'll need to find a way to help a crawler along.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Easy, build an old school site-map page and add a link to it at the top and the bottom of every page. Make sure the you add a link to every page and make sure that the links are standard text links. This will give the spiders a entry point to very page of your site.

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That javascript menu that you have can be redone in HTML + CSS. That will make the navigation much better. If you don't know how to do it, check out this site: CSS Menu Tutorial - Horizontal and Vertical CSS Menus it pretty much tells you how to do it, but you do have to addapt it of course so it looks and works the way you want it.

Or hire a company to do this for you.

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Unfortunatly it's not up to me to give the green light on changing the navigation since I'm still a student and have 0 power, I have mentioned it and hopefully things will be improved.

Right now I'm working on an old-skool html sitemap in the hopes the site gets indexed better, like Inertia suggested:

That's definitely a solution that is easier to do and explain to your managers. The only way to convince them of a fancy html-css menu is by spending a weekend at home on this menu. Copy the home page, and make a static page, create the menu and see if you can make it look and work exactly the same. Then show that to the people.

2 things can happen:

1) You'll be praised.
2) People will be upset because you outsmarted them.

You'll have to decide what's most likely to happen and how bothered you will be in case option 2) would happen.

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Some great advice that! Rep points added...

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My input was much appreciated, I'm a happy camper

Once again, thank you all for the useful advice!

Try to do some more onpage optimization if you want to be there at Yahoo and msn ....

rest is ok with google....try what you want,............................

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what i can suggest is submit your sitemap to yahoo and msn then continue link building remember to concentrate on quality content not quantity.

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