More has been written about optimizing websites to gain high rankings on the search engines than on almost any other internet-related topic. But to my knowledge no-one has yet attempted to understand the sex of search engines: is their behaviour closer to that of typical male or female characteristics? If we thought about this it would help us determine the best way to appeal to them.
The situation with MSN is clear-cut: MSN is male. Ranking on MSN is straightforward: follow the conventional SEO wisdom and you will succeed, as long as your rivals are less assiduous in doing this than you. Put up some decent content, make sure you have relevant titles, load your metatags with keywords, build an inventory of quality inbound links, vary your keyword anchor-text, put in place a good proportion of deep links and you will get to #1. You can get a #1 position on MSN for reasonably competitive keywords within a week. MSN is WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get.
Is Yahoo male or female? This is not so easy to determine. Perhaps he/she is a transsexual, or perhaps androgynous. Occasionally Yahoo is as uncomplicated as a man: follow the rules, hand over your fees and become a member of the club. At other times, on keywords which seem to be as or less competitive, and where my optimization efforts appear just as strong, my efforts go unrewarded. For these words, Yahoo is a clearly female, but one wholly indifferent to my charms.
Google, on the other hand is surely all female, with womanly charms and deep with female mystery. If you want to understand Google you have to learn the arts of seduction. Is there anything on this earth more frustrating than optimizing your website to rank at the top for a competitive keyword on Google? Often I think not. She is a woman who is always just out of my reach. She will not reveal what turns her on for even the largest diamond from the jewellers. I know that I have the best and most informative content, more high-quality links, more deep links, more variations in anchor text, more articles and more blog comments than any of my rivals. . Not a one of my 5000 or so backlinks is directly reciprocated, and I have at least 10 in-bound links for every out-bound one. A good proportion of my inbound links are voluntary recognition of the value of my site by other sites. Is this enough? Well, yes and no. I do have easily the most favored positions across all the search engines, measured on average across my keywords. But whereas I am undisputedly dominant in MSN, I am only very strong in Google: 2nd or 3rd on my target words. I do well, really very well, but I do not destroy the competition. Google has recognized my worth, somewhat, but she has not opened herself to me entirely.
Like a woman, she has her pets: sites which appealed to her in the distant past, but whose appeal has long since declined according to rational analysis, can still be rewarded with a #1 position. Like a woman she is also very fickle. I have been endeavouring to build a position for a single keyword (Whistler) for several years now. (It’s a reasonably strongly-contested category – around 40 million sites feature this word.) When I started I was at about 25 (by virtue of this single word being part of all the other word-phrases that I target). I have built links with this single word as anchor text into directories, into articles, into other listings. Many of these links are on URLs with good PageRank. More than 80% of these links are in the middle of solid, interesting text.
The result: every so often I find I have climbed to a decent position: say 9th, sometimes even 5th or 6th. A day or two, or even an hour or two later,, I fall back to 15th or even 20th. She tolerates me, she favours me with the occasional smile, and sometimes I even manage to entertain her. But just when I think I deserve a kiss in return as my lips come near, she turns her face away and I am sent back to the third rank of suitors. But her attractions are such that I am inexorably drawn once more to try to penetrate her inner circle. But I feel that if I am every successful, and our lips are joined in perfect harmony, and she responds to my touch as I would to hers, I will never be certain what it was that I did to deserve my good fortune.
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