Question: An innkeeper was recently told that it is better to use WordPress because the other search engines (Bing, Yahoo, etc) do not like to include "Google" content in their search findings so if you are using Google Blogger you are losing out on those search engines.
Answer: Though you want your blog to be seen everywhere, we believe the most important place to be seen well is in GOOGLE and this is why.
Here are the numbers from Hitwise 2009
Google: 74.3% of humans use Google to search
Yahoo: 16.2% of humans use Yahoo to search
Bing: 5.0% of humans use Bing to search
Ask: 3.2% of humans use Ask to search
Others: 1.3% of humans use one of the other search engines out there to search.
Business owners can see why Google traffic is so important by looking at your statistics (Urchin or Google Analytics), and sort out the search engine referrals. Filter Google then Filter Yahoo and finally Filter MSN. You will see that Google Traffic is always higher (to your own site) than the other two. So basically, you don't want to “cater to” the other 2 in lieu of losing Google placement.
We’ll use the following EXAMPLE to prove that MSN and Yahoo do not discriminate against placing Google Blogger Blog Posts in their results.
Google Blogger Blog Post dated March 26, 2010
Blog Title: Hershey Antique Auto Museum, Hershey B&B
Blog Link: http://blog.1825inn.com/2010/03/hershey-antique-auto-museum-hershey-b.html
Results for the search phrase: Hershey Antique Auto Museum, Hershey B&B
Results for the search phrase: Hershey Antique Auto Museum (without the Hershey B&B)
Note: The reason we also tested this phrase is because it is more highly used by the surfing public than the one we tested above.
Interesting side note: Blog posts, whether posted using WordPress or Google are treated as Real Time Results in Google, but not so much in Yahoo or Bing. Yahoo and Bing will ultimately index a new Blog post, but they tend to not be nearly as fast as Google.
Finally, any Blog Post Titles and internal text should be well investigated to make sure people are typing them. These type of phrases will drive more traffic, just because more people are using them. That is why it's not about the PRODUCT you choose, but about the content and the way you craft / write the post to be SEO friendly.
Lisa Kolb
President and Co-Founder
Acorn Marketing
