While you're beating yourself up about where you appear in search results, consider this: A senior search engine executive admitted in a candid conversational moment that there wasn't much of a qualitative difference between the top 50 results.

No kidding.

My senior search engine analyst attended a recent search engine conference. In a discussion with an executive at a major search engine, the exec candidly admitted that, as far as their ranking algorithms were concerned, there wasn't that much of a difference between result #1 and result #50.

How can this be?

It's pretty simple: The number of Websites for any topic is only increasing, and the understanding of what search engines are looking for only grows. So we've got more and more sites, which are all pretty hip about search engine optimization.

What's a search engine to do? Split hairs, you could say, because the differences between sites - in the eyes of search engines - are hardly more than that nowadays.

This isn't about beating up on search engines. This is a reality picture of the Web. Just do any search. How many results are there? Millions, often. Of those millions, there are thousands and thousands of sites that are pretty sharp about optimizing for search results. If thousands are doing more or less the same or similar things (being savvy about 'on the page' placement of key words and 'off the page' placement of links), how much difference will there really be, between the top 10, 50 or even 100 sites? About a hair's breadth, I'd guess.

So, how should this knowledge affect your search engine strategy? It shouldn't. The two most important parts about winning the search engine wars are:

1. Never put all your advertising eggs in the search engine basket (because organic search results always change and cannot be relied upon and you don't build a business on a trap door!)

2. Always grow your search engine optimization (because everybody else is!). The fact that one exec admits the difference between the top 50 sites is minuscule simply underscores the importance of these two points.

Published: September 29, 2004

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