Test - using Yahoo search for a week

This week I am going to use Yahoo Search (mostly from in firefox, like normal) instead of Google. I'll look back at google now and then to see what difference the results are. I'll be using the .co.uk version of each.

I decided to try this for a couple of reasons. One my post last week after reading how the top 10 in each tends to be different. Also working with websites with puchase parts at the moment tend to rank and be crawled better by Yahoo. As opposed to the research style of Google for text content.

My first test today resulted in -1 yahoo +1 google, for my serach for the ServerAlias directive for Apache. 'apache server alias' on Yahoo returned a top 10 on the Alias command, which is for aliasing directories not the whole server domain name. Google got it right with the first result being a page with ServerAlias on. It was resarch query so going with type.

Term | Yahoo | Google | Type(Reseach/Shopping)
'apache server alias' -1 +1 R

The test continues.

Posting your name first in title helps Google rank

I think the change I made last week posting the name of the compnay first in the url for the homepage readlly did work for Google ranking.

I changed from
About the Restaurant << The Black Rat Restaurant, Winchester
to
The Black Rat << The Black Rat Restaurant, Winchester

And now I get a reasonable rank on google for 'the black rat' on its own, 4th on google.co.uk. I think that is quite respectiable as the site does not have any PR yet and there must be millions of pages about real rats, 6,300,000 to be exact.

So quite pleased with my results at the moment.

Offline is a good boost

The other boost the site stats the local county newspaper did one review and one interview and then posted them on two of their websites. So the traffic jumped to double the highest point for a day on friday when it hit the news stands. See if it drops off again this week or not.

Another quick tip:
Put the url in plain text in a post on your blog as Google News tracker seems to like that more that in an a tag when reporting on wordpress.com stats. Not sure if it helps more than that. But it could be why my blog ranks over the main site?

Taken over the google top 10 for brand terms but main site not top

Well I am all over my keywords now on google now some of the backlinks and reviews are kicking in I hold 8 out of the 10 places on google.com and .co.uk for:
the black rat winchester
black rat winchester
black rat restaurant

Now I know they are not big terms but that does not matter they are my key brand terms for this site. The only problem is the main site is now no 3 or 4 as sub pages are showing on the search. Now all the pages seem to have 0 or unranked PageRank but this blogger account is from a bigger domain and then a review site and then the host site. Now my view is the domain with the keyword should come first but I guess bigger and older sites are still more important.

I have made a couple of changes and will watch next week to see if I can get the restaurants site to be first on the list. But anyway I am pleased with my results as I have not worked too hard to get those words. I am working to get into restaurant winchester and the more generic terms that I am low in.

As they say there are always about 80% more non brand terms you can get search traffic for than brand terms (will quote the report when remember it)