The Importance of Google

So why a special guide just on Google? Aren’t there hundreds, if not thousands, of search engines out there that need to be worried about? There are many other search engines and search directories that exist, but Google is the most prominent, most used, and most important of them all. At the very least, it is the search engine you should focus your website promotion efforts on first. So let’s discuss why this is so…

Without a doubt, Google is the largest and most used search engine in the world today. Google currently indexes over 3.3 billion Web pages (as well as PDF, Word, Excel and other files), over 425 million images, over 800 million Usenet (newsgroup) messages, and performs more than 200 million searches per day (as of September 2003).

Google also currently provides search results to other search engines and directories, notably Yahoo!, AOL, Netscape, Lycos, CompuServe, Earthlink, and AT&T Worldnet.

This means a # 1 ranking on Google also mostly likely will land you a # 1 position on these partner sites as well! I say “likely” because the partner sites tend to blend their results a little bit so the rankings across the partners may not be exact. To repeat:

a #1 ranking on Google also generally means a #1 ranking on:

Yahoo!
AOL
Netscape
Earthlink
CompuServe
Lycos (Sympatico)
iWon.com
GO.com
AT&T Worldnet

With its partners included, Google is now responsible for powering over 76% of all search engine traffic to websites.

In addition, the chart below illustrates that more people are spending time on Google searching for what they need than on any other search firm. If you also include Google’s two major search partners AOL and Yahoo!, this is a lot of time web surfers spend in just a few places.

Clearly then, Google is where you need to focus your website promotion efforts. After you have applied the techniques discussed in this guide, have monitored your results, and then refined your efforts over several months time, you should start seeing dramatic results. As an aside, the other major search engines are starting to look for the same elements as Google. So if you get it right for Google, you have also gotten it right in general for all the other search engines!