Yahoo - Google Algo Comparision

[McMohan]

Excuse me if this subject is already covered in detail before, but haven't seen this in recent time though.

Here is my experiance working with these 2 engines. Appreciate more value additions from all of you. I have only selected factors on a broad level as a starting plank -

Title Attribute / Meta Description

Yahoo -

Gives more weightage for word order and proximity.

Stemming isn't well developed, needing one to conciously optimize the site for more word forms.

Google -

Gives lesser weightage towards word order and proximity.

Stemming is well developed.

Content

Yahoo -

Again Yahoo gives more importance to word order and proximity of words.

Stemming isn't well developed.

Doesn't use the infamous LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) that Google supposedly uses.

Google -

Gives lesser weightage to word order and proximity than Yahoo.

Stemming is well developed.

Uses the LSI to good effect to weed out content written for search engines than for humans. Optimal Keyword density has become a hisory with the advent of LSI and it is more of well-rounded content written by domain experts.

Outbound Links

Yahoo

Doesn't give any brownie points for providing outbound links to related sites.

Google

Gives credit to pages providing outbound links to relevant/authoritative sites, and thus stymies PR hoarding.

Inbound back links

Yahoo

Any link is a good link, as far as they are not from Yahoo penalzed sites.

Gives a greater weightage to the Anchor text than the link neighborhood.

Site affiliation is not clearly established.

Nothing like a link sandbox is establised.

Google

Links from relevant sites are given the weightage, in the order of their PR. Links from unrelated sites, irrespective of their PR, are ignored.

Gives as much importance to the link neighborhood (surrounding text, page heading, Title etc), as much given to the anchor text (perhaps even more)

Hilltop algo does a great job of establishing site affiliation.

New links are sandboxed for about 2 to 4r months, before they can pass the benefit. (Supposedly aimed at stalling the text link buying/selling?)

Hope, these cover points on a macro level. Love to see you all chipping in with more algo differentiators :)

Thanks
Mc

[RFranzen]

Thanks for the info, Mc!

It is my understanding that Google pretty much ignores the meta tags, except to occasionally display the meta description tag as part of a listing's description.

Yahoo usually uses the description tag as part of the description. It also uses the information within both the description and keyword meta fields as part of on-page factors to consider.

-- Rich

[Eurotrader]

Quote: "Google Gives credit to pages providing outbound links to relevant/authoritative sites, and thus stymies PR hoarding."

This is something I've been researching lately. Do you have any proof that this helps in Google?

It makes sense because this would improve relevence.

Also, how do you determine which sites are "authorities"? Are they simply the sites in the top 10 for your given keyword?

Thanks- I appreciate any info.

[cabowabo]

Also, how do you determine which sites are "authorities"? Are they simply the sites in the top 10 for your given keyword?

Your best measure for an authoritative site is one that ranks in the top 50,000 in Alexa and has at least 500 pages in the Google index. There are exceptions, of course, but this will help you week out pretenders.

CaboWabo

[McMohan]

It is my understanding that Google pretty much ignores the meta tags, except to occasionally display the meta description tag as part of a listing's description.

IMHO, Google totally ignores the META keywords, but not so sure about META description. It still counts, however little that may be.

Do you have any proof that this helps in Google?

A definitive proof of anything is difficult to establish, but going by some of own experience and of others, there seems to be some benefit. Afterall a website, as a part of www is suppose to be a combintion of inbound and outbound links, not one that ends in a dead end.

Mc