Quality versus Quantity, Google versus Yahoo

There has been a lot of ground covered lately in the search engine wars. One headline is particularly fetching, namely, “Yahoo exceeds Google in number of pages indexed.” The report proclaims that Yahoo’s index is now larger than Google’s, with some obscene number being quoted (I believe it was 20-billion versus Google’s 8-billion).

While this is undoubtedly a noteworthy achievement on Yahoo’s part, it is important not to get caught up in the hype and abandon the tried-and-true best search engine on the market. Yahoo seems focused on quantity with less regard as to the quality of their algorithm. Google, on the other hand, has always been dedicated to the quality of their search and the end user experience, and will undoubtedly continue to dominate the market despite radical claims that they’re losing ground (which, quite often, are propaganda spouted by Google’s chief competitors).

What effect does this news have on your SEO efforts? If you lend the story credence and worth, then you might shift your primary focus away from Google and put more into optimizing for Yahoo. This would, however, be inadvisable, as Yahoo seems determined to index every page on the net in order to boost its total, even those that are devoid of merit. In other words, you’ll be indexed whether or not you take the time to optimize. Google, on the other hand, continues to be regarded as the highest-quality index, and so inclusion here will still be more worthwhile for the sake of site reputation as well qualified traffic.