Search Party (So why do I get Google hits but not Yahoo hits?)

     I’ve noticed among some of my blogging friends that it’s become sort of cool to say “I don’t care about hits, I just put it out there and whoever needs to find it will. I don’t even look at my hits.”
  
My Dad owned a not all that successful restaurant that had better food than his main competitor down the block, but never the business or the reputation.  There used to be a mantra in the restaurant world “If the food and service is good, the customers will find you.”  It’s not completely true.  Restaurants with perfectly good food and service go out of business all the time and other places with bad food and iffy service often flourish for reasons that have little to do with food or service and a lot to do with promotion and location. Of course, most blogs aren’t businesses either.

     At the risk of giving up any semblance of blog-coolness, I admit that I check my hit reports regularly through site-meter.com.  At this point, the vast majority of my hits still come from blind searches, people using a search engine to track down links on a particular topic.   More than 90% of those come from Google, the largest search engine.  Quite possibly because Blogger is owned by Google, my blog does surprisingly well in Google searches.  My articles are well up on searches for odd topics like the rumors about the President’s affair with Condoleeza Rice, the book of Judas, various American Idol contestants, Hop Sing, Vladimir Horowitz and Art Tatum, different junior volleyball players, the sonic impact T-amp, the script for Rambo 4,  and flypaper.  I assume it has something to do with the fact that no one else has written much about these particular topics.  For instance, I have a bunch of articles about Karl Rove but I don’t much get Google search hits for him likely because there are hundreds even thousands of political bloggers who write about the personification of evil.

     About ten days ago, I started noticing that I almost never get yahoo searches. Yahoo is likely the second most popular search engine and way back when started blogging I did submit my site to Yahoo through my “Myyahoo” page’s “add content” option.  I began to check  searches in Yahoo and my site wasn’t on the first several pages for the topics generating the majority of my blind hits.  Although Google searches are subsumed in some way on Yahoo, the ratings system is very different when it comes to blogs.  I researched it a bit and other than the fact that Yahoo seems to be better set up for commercial sites, the general answer seemed to have to do with my being more RSS friendly (real simple syndication), something I’m working on.  I’m still trying to figure out how to put up the XML link in my right hand column.

One of the trends in web 2.0 world is the development of meta-sites where users identify sites of interest and then rate the sites recursively to develop a list of “recommended or hot sites” within the group.  A lot of those places are understandably cautious about letting blogs into the mix because the owners of blogs tend to self-promote.  Promoting one’s own site on the Internet has become very complicated stuff and takes a level of technical skill that’s currently a bit beyond me.  (I still get nervous when I have to manipulate my template in Blogger and there are all these competing syndication methods right now).  One of my posts did wind up on one of these meta-sites and I was genuinely astonished by the effect shoutwire.com had on my hits.

Understanding the ins and outs of the search engine seems to be the rough equivalent of mastering the impact of interest rates in the real estate market.  Much like the real estate market, I went into it simply assuming that I was just buying or building a home someplace.

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