Which search engine do you target?

[Suzanne]

Just curious what you search engine marketing people aim for. Which search engines do you namely target?

[Commerce Brian]

My main personal goals is to aim for Google.com. My business customers are usually UK companies, and I can always guarrantee them rankings on Google.co.uk for UK searches - and then use that as a platform to attack Google.com rankings.
 
 MSN and Yahoo are very unpredictable as search engines - they can be found using very outdated indexes, and tend not to crawl sites anywhere near as effectively as Google can. That means that they tend to pick up far less links and far less quickly.
 
 Overall, my personal sites have some very good rankings on MSN and Yahoo simply because they are well-established - but for newer sites it takes quite some time to be established.
 
 As Google is not only quicker and more efficient, but also has a wider share of the search market, it makes perfect sense to aim for it first.

[altyfc]

I worry about Google and little else.  I know some would say that's blinkered but it seems to work for us. That's how it'll remain for as long as Google's the one bringing us traffic.
 
Aaron

[paulhiles]

I also tend to target Google.com as my primary SE. I get crawled regularly by both Yahoo and MSN bots, but rarely see their indexes showing my new or updated pages. These guys will really have to get their act together if we're going to see true competition between the so-called "big 3" search engines!

[Commerce Brian]

You're quite right there - while Yahoo and MSN may be huge as portals, it's still Google that people turn to for general web searching. So I guess it's rather natural for SEO to remain focussed on the Google search engines.

[Pamil Visions]

I've decided to revive this topic. Personally I think you should target all the main search engines: google, yahoo, altavista, msn etc.

Why? Simply. I get plenty of traffic from msn and yahoo (35%) That's not to be ingored. Plus: it's easier to get indexed by yahoo and msn than by google and also easiwer to get high SERP. Once you are there, google will follow. So... think about it.

[taiarain]

I'm going to bump this back up to the top.

Taia

[Pamil Visions]

Thanks, Taia. But it looks people already know what search engines to target. No one even wonders anymore 

[dave]

Both Google and Yahoo.   as men are from google and women are from yahoo