Rank well in Google and MSN and Yahoo?

[texasville]

I would like to just see some traffic from google. I get ALL my traffic from the many directories I am listed in that come up in google and msn and yahoo.
Google finally let me out of the sanbox but my placement in the serps seems to show I am still heavily filtered. On the other hand MSN(particularly)
and Yahoo love me. What I find strange is black hat sites abound in the top serps in google in my sector and those same sites do poorly in msn and yahoo.

My question is: Can you build a site that appeals to all three search engines?
I constantly hear from so many that complain they do poorly in google but so well in MSN and Yahoo. Should you build two sites? Optimize for google on one
and MSN and Yahoo on the other? I would like to see example sites that rank well in all three. Does anybody rank well in all three?

[SFReader]

I build for Google and consistantly do well in Yahoo. Often better in Yahoo.

[stinkfoot]

Would be a very boring world if you could do all 3 with one site with ease

[Rugles]

I do well in all 3. They all basically are looking for the same thing, the factors involved in the algo for each of are probably similar. The just likely give different values to each factor.

[notsosmart]

Impossible, methinks.

Okay, let me rephrase that: for uber-competitive terms, it is impossible. For less cutthroat 2-3 word phrases, it's very doable.

Until a nasty Google update last week, we were in the top ten for a top $ term in both G and MSN. Yahoo dumped us a long time ago, for reasons they can only know, but at least G and MSN were treating us fairly.

Now, I just cry on my keyboard.

Sorry about the off-topic rant, but it's been a stressful week.

[frup]

If you have a strong site it's actually normal to rank in the top 10 in all three engines. Like was already said, they are all looking for the same thing. Put another way, MSN and Yahoo are trying to emulate Google's results and methods.

[Eltiti]

So it's somewhere between "impossible" and "normal"... ;-)

I suspect it depends on the commercial potential of the KWP.

I have one site that's on the first page of all three (actually: G #2, Y #2, M #10) for its two-word KWP --a term with over 2 million competing results, but, alas, rather limited financial potential.

For other, high-$$ terms, my results vary wildly between SE.

[siteseo]

It's not impossible.

If you follow best-practices SEO and get a high number of quality inbound text links, you can have all the bases covered and rank well in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Several of our sites are #1 for competitive 1 and 2 keyword phrases on all three engines, and we don't do any cloaking, build doorway pages, or anything beyond best-practices SEO. That doesn't mean that our sites are 100% perfect for each engine - just that they're "good enough" in the primary areas that each algorithm looks at, and that other things like quality IBL's offset any imperfections.

Now if a competitor wanted to beat us just in one engine, they could possibly do that by optimizing for that engine to the hilt - and that does happen on occasion.