At first the title may seem like an obvious point, for traffic. Today I was thinking about how the webmaster talk seems to always be on how to get listed better in Google rather than Yahoo, MSN or any of the other engines out there. I started thinking about the obvious and not so obvious points that make a webmaster become so focused on Google and realized this might be a good post on our blog.

The Obvious Reason – Traffic!
As anyone with half a brain knows, Google is the most searched engine out there. Why would you not want a percentage of the traffic within your respective market from Google? The percentage you would get from their users would probably equal all other engines combined. That doesn’t mean all markets, but typically our clients that track origination of users from search engines claim Google far surpasses the others. So this point alone would be the obvious reason why one would target Google.

The Not So Obvious Reason – The Challenge!
This could compare to an every day life phenomenon that seems to be a trait in all humans. It’s human nature to always want what you either cannot have or is tough to get. For example, women typically go after the men that treat them like crap or will not give them the time of day. Men typically go after women that are completely out of their league. It’s all about the challenge. Getting someone that throws themselves at you is usually not as much fun.

The same I believe goes into targeting search engines. Google is the obvious challenge search engine to listed well with. MSN tends to be one that throws themselves at you and getting good placement is fairly easy. Yahoo is somewhere in between the two, but compared to Google, is fairly easy. Google seems to have more of a “us against them” attitude towards webmasters. There are more penalties and filters put in place to defeat the webmaster’s ploy for top placement than there are new features to make their product better.

Speaking of penalties, who ever said “constructive criticism” was the way to go? If Google wants to penalize a website, whether it is a good move or Google’s mistake, they just do it and move on. It’s as if they think everyone knows about their webmaster guidelines and know the Google fact or fiction tidbits. What if someone just took Google offline and failed to mention it to them? Think they would freak out and want an explanation? I think they fail to realize that as big as they have become, people rely on what they offer to survive as an online business. A good practice would be to shoot a message to websites that are penalized or banned telling the website owner why it happened and what steps would be required to get reincluded in their search results. I believe in Google’s eyes, ever site owner will know if they are doing right or wrong, which is completely inaccurate.

I stumbled off topic a bit there, but the point of this post is to shine a light on the idea webmasters go after Google for more than just the obvious.

Not So Obvious Reason #2 – Self Accepting Trophy
Any webmaster will agree that getting listed well on Google is a great achievement. An achievement that is one we like to talk about to anyone interested in listening. So once it happens, not only is it a great traffic boost, but it’s a self accepting trophy that we can parade around with because we conquered that elusive challenge. Nothing like telling another webmaster, “We’re #1 on Google for our keywords!”.