In the world of Charleston SEO, we like it when things are simple. As you might have noticed, however, things are rarely simple! Managing South Carolina SEO can feel like trying to herd cats, to use an expression from our part of the country! One example is the rather confusing fact that Yahoo and Bing regularly yield different search results for the same keyword phrase—despite the fact that Yahoo uses the exact same algorithm as Bing!
Results May Vary
Your company’s Charleston SEO campaign may have your website in first place on Bing’s search results page for your most important keyword, but on Yahoo you might be in third place or lower. Why the different results? It looks like the root of the discrepancy is that Yahoo isn’t always as up-to-date as Bing.
Imagine two kiosks in the mall that theoretically provide the same information about store hours to shoppers. If one kiosk receives a notification about new hours for a boutique, it then sends that information to the second kiosk. But a visitor to the second kiosk in the meantime will receive “old” information. In the same way, Yahoo’s results seem to “catch up” to Bing’s after a while. By then, however, Bing may have updated its indexing again!
The Bottom Line for Charleston SEO
If you’re working with a South Carolina SEO company to improve your search results, don’t lose heart if your rankings on Bing and Yahoo aren’t exactly the same. Even with the temporary difference in rankings, on the first page of results the change usually isn’t a big one. The farther down in the results your website appears, the larger the discrepancy will probably be.
Another twist to this issue may be lurking on the horizon. Recently, Yahoo has been experimenting with displaying search results from Google instead of Bing. If executives like what they see, it could be a whole new chapter for South Carolina SEO.
