Good on YAHOO / Nowhere Google

Differences on yahoo/google

[llmm123]

Hi all,

Our website gets amazing placement on yahoo... for our top keywords we are in the top 3 free listings. On google however we are almost nowhere to be found. We are indexed, but our website doesnt even display in the top 500 for the keywords that do so well on yahoo.

We recently (4 months ago) created a new website and I tried to do everything I should/could to make it SE friendly etc. Now I would want to believe, seeing our website does so well on yahoo, it will just be a question of time before it does well on google too, but I dont think this is true as our old website (which was up for many years) ALSO did very well on Y, but nowhere on G.

Any idea what is happening here? What am I doing right for Y, but so very wrong for G. As I said, we ARE indeed indexed on G.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

LL

[tedster]

If you're doing well on Yahoo, then your on-page factors are probably OK - so I'd look more at off-page factors. One of the key differences between the two search engines is Google's intense focus on links - they really scrutinize a site's links "six ways from Sunday". This comes about partly because of their PageRank forumla, whcih is completely defined by links.

So Google watches your entire "backlink profile" for imbalances that don't look natural -- too many of one type of link, not enough variation in anchor text, and so on. They may decided not to "count' links that other search engines would count -- the list goes on and on. Unnatural anchor text for internal links can also trip you up, sometimes.

This thread may give you some ideas:
Natural vs. Un-natural - in SEO and the Google Algorithm [webmasterworld.com]

[llmm123]

Thank you tedster... I will also look at the link you provided.

I have about 150 pages and pretty much each one of these pages have my navigation menu on it...... so, what I'm trying to say is that the same links/urls are on +-150 pages. Is this what you mean by too many of the same links?

Thanks,
LL

[tedster]

No, that's a very natural navigation menu. You can mess up a menu by including the word "widgets" in too many of those anchor elements, but I was actually talking about links from other domains.

You can get into trouble by having almost all your inbound links come from blogs, or from directories, or from other sites in an obvious network, or from sites that clearly sell links, etc. To do well, you need a natural balance of links, and Google has measures to know when a backlink profile is not very natural. They may even weight inbound links differently when they see things like that.

[piatkow]

Are you using frames by any chance? That can make a difference.

[Robert Charlton]

(4 months ago) created a new website...

In addition to weighting links differently than Yahoo, Google has some apparent aging factors built into its algo. Four months might still be too young for most new sites on Google to be ranking on anything but long tail phrases.

How old are your links, and do they come from good quality sources independent from your own sites?

[llmm123]

Thank you everybody for your answers.

No, I do not use frames AT ALL. Like I said, I really tried to be as SE friendly as possible.

What I do realize now, through your answers, is that I need inbound links and that I dont have many of! I maybe have about 10 from good-average quality sites.

Do you think this will make such a huge difference.... If I now put in an effort to get good-quality links, things might change?

LL

[tedster]

Yes, links will help. Anyone with a relatively young website, struggling to see Google rankings, should find benefit from reading this thread:

Filters exist - the Sandbox doesn't. How to build Trust. [webmasterworld.com]