The Google Beast

As of the dawn of 2010 really only one search engine matters. Bing is a new player, and really I hope that it catches on. However, only 1 engine really is being used right now - Google. The Google Beast has revolutionized the market.

Below I took the Google anayltics tracking from 3 sites. 2 of them I manage, and 1 is managed by a coworker in the field. I also picked 3 different sized sites. The first site is the forum on a large user community. The second is a store and the third is an advertiser for a retail business. The interesting thing is that the largest site also makes the least amount of money for the 3 sites studied, though its 100 times larger than the other sites. But really that project wasn’t designed from the ground up to be a business venture, just self sustaining.

For me it is the 80 - 20 rule. Spend time going after 80% of the market, and not worry about the other 20%. However, because of the vast use of Google search engine. On the first retail store site they spend a lot of money advertising and optimizing their site not only for Google but also Bing, AOL and yahoo. However, we have to wonder if its worth the revenue to go after those markets, and instead focus on Google and creating referrals. For the other 2 sites, that I manage, I don’t even focus around anything but inbound links, and Google.

Moving Forward

All in all at this point I still am quite interested to see what Bing is going to do, and where it will go. But I think that for the vast majority of my clients, it will be still to focus on Google Search engine, and having quality inbound links (known as Referrals in the chart). Basically what I wrote here still seems to be correct.