Google SEO vs. Bing SEO vs. Yahoo SEO – Differences and Similarities

Although Google has more than 90% share of the search engine market, it was the first one ever established and is certainly not the last. Apart from Google, Bing and Yahoo are popular and among the biggest competitors in the industry.

Apart from providing searchers with access to resources and important information, Bing, Yahoo, and Google serve as the best marketing platforms for every business, from small and medium to big ones.

While these search engines have the same features, they all have a unique specialty in digital marketing. As a searcher or webmaster, it would be best to learn how to read search engine ranking reports and know the strengths of every platform before you decide where to put your energy more.

Optimizing Your Website for Yahoo, Bing, and Google

Due to the subtle nuances of all these search engines, there is no one-fits-all approach to optimizing your website for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Rather, you will have to go through your website and ensure it is well optimized. There are several steps to guide you in optimizing your website for these search engines. These steps include:

• Making your website mobile-friendly
• Using keywords in meta-descriptions, image alt attributes, and title tags
• Creating a good user experience through informative content and easy navigation
• Building external links
• Using flash sparingly
• Using authorship

Google

Google receives more than 65,000 searches per second. It is doing a great job in its effort to offer searchers the most accurate and relevant information on the internet.

But with more power comes a lot of responsibilities, and Google has its criticism from searchers and webmasters alike.

Though in general, Google is king for a good reason. It continues to dominate the search engine market share since its algorithms combined with customization abilities make it suitable for many webmasters and searchers.

Yahoo

David Filo and Jerry Yang launched Yahoo in 1994, with headquarters located in Sunnyvale, California. Apart from being one of the popular search engines globally, it provides other services, such as Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, Yahoo Fantasy Sports, and Yahoo Mail.

It generates more than $324 million searches every day and gets about 3.2 billion visits per year. Indeed, these are impressive numbers. Also, half of their traffic comes from the US, with the next biggest audiences coming from France (4%), Canada (4%), the UK (4%), and Taiwan (5%).

Bing

Bing was originally created in 2006 by Microsoft. It was called Windows Live Search before it got rebranded fully three years later after it was launched. At first, Windows Live Search was created to compete against Google.

After it was introduced, their big and initial update was referred to as Tiger. This introduced their first indexing technology. Compared to Google, Bing doesn’t update their algorithm frequently.

This is important because an update in the algorithm may impact your site’s ranking. So you should make changes accordingly and use the Bing rank tracker to know your ranking progress.

Striking Similarities

In addition to aspects unique to Bing, Yahoo, and Google, there are several similarities that you can’t possibly ignore.

Those similarities are a perfect way to combat the differences between Bing, Yahoo, and Google and help boost your search engine optimization for these trio. These similarities include:

• Paid search: Works the same in all these search engines. But note that this is just a rented space for websites.
• Geo-keywords: Yahoo, Google, and Bing all use geo-specific keywords to value pages for their local content.
• Local search results: Optimization and web page content must have keywords as per the geographical areas in order to show up on the first page of search results.
• Influence and company size: Whether you use Google, Yahoo, or Bing, the bigger your business is, the higher it will rank. This is basically an automatic feature of all these three search engines. So if you compete against the big brands, strategically choose your keywords in order to improve your rankings.

Key Differences

The organic search results of Bing vary from Yahoo and Google. Their SERPs also vary based on search queries, regardless of being powered by similar search technology. You will notice the difference mainly in terms of mobile optimization.

Several years ago, Google introduced the mobile-friendly label on search results. The label is grey wording, which helps mobile-friendly sites rank well in mobile searches.

While Yahoo hasn’t included this feature yet, Bing has mobile-friendly, just like Google has. Although Bing revealed several mobile-friendly techniques, it isn’t clear whether it will introduce the feature for the algorithm or not. Apart from mobile optimization, these three search engines differ in terms of:

• Device indexing
• Backlinking
• Keywords
• Social media
• Multimedia content

In a Nutshell!

Knowing how different search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Google work is one of the steps toward getting your website ranked.

But generally, Google dominates the search market with an impressive lead. That is why you need to ensure your site is in line with the ranking guidelines of Google.