Axandra news archive: 21 August 2007

This week, we're taking a look at the search engine market shares in Europe.

In the news: how competitors can remove your website from Google's index, US search engine stats, buying links doesn't seem to be a good idea and more.

Table of contents:

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Recommended resources
• Previous articles

If you target international markets then it's important to know which search engines are used by European web surfers.

Google has a large market share in the US. Astonishingly, Google's market share seems to be even bigger in Europe. Here are the numbers from Germany, France and the UK:

Search engine market shares in Germany

With a market share of 88.5%, Google is the clear leader in Germany. Yahoo has 3.4%, followed by German ISP T-Online (2.2%), MSN (1.4%) and AOL (1.3%).

Search engine market shares in France

With 89.79%, Google's has an enormous market share in France. Yahoo follows with 3.14%. MSN gets 2.48%, local ISP's Orange and Free get 1.89% and 0.72%.

Search engine market shares in the UK

Google has a market share of 79.38% in the UK. Yahoo gets 7.72%. With 4.48%, Ask.com is the third biggest search engine in the UK. Microsoft's search engines MSN and Live get 3.75% and 1.53% (a total of 5.28% for Microsoft search engines).

Google is by far the most widely used search engine in these European countries. The stats show how important it is to optimize your website for Google.

To get high rankings on Google, you need good inbound links and optimized web page content. IBP helps you to get both. The latest IBP version works with all local Google versions, including Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.de and Google.fr.

"A good friend has allowed his reputation to suffer, rather than disclose what we knew. I continue to see web sites that are affected by this issue. After giving Google more than a year to resolve the issue, I have decided that the only way to spur them to action is to publish what I know."

Google gains, Yahoo loses under ComScore changes

"Under ComScore's new qSearch 2.0, Yahoo lost market share from a year ago and is now at 23.5 percent for July, while Google gained share, reaching 55.2 percent market share. The other market share loser was AOL."

Report: offline ads are heavy drivers of search

"According to a new study by Jupiter Research and search marketing agency iProspect, a surprising two-thirds of searchers are led to search on a given keyword as a result of offline marketing."

Search engine newslets

• Warnings Google needs to incorporate.
• Study: web surfers spend more time with content.
• AOL improves its mobile search.
• Google adds a malware review form to its webmaster tools.
• Microsoft says its web search on positive trajectory.
• Humor: Yahoo invents a new sport.
• Yahoo Local gets a makeover.
• Google introduces the ad traffic quality resource center.
• Like.com: Neat site or serious search tool?
• Google increases stake in China.
• Enterprise 2.0 failure: Can you trust Google Grand Central?
• Yahoo audio search adds samples.
• Google's Eric Schmidt on Web 3.0 (video).

"We cannot praise IBP highly enough."

"Okay, so we're not on the first page of Google just yet but our domain name and commercial loans web site are still relatively new.

What we have found though is that we are gaining better positioning in Google for a small selection of our chosen keywords such as low cost business mortgages simply by using IBP 9 for optimising our web pages, both on and off page and also ARELIS which we find a massive help when it comes to organising our custom built reciprocal links directory which we have themed to fit in with the exact look and feel of our overall site.

IBP 9 and ARELIS by Axandra have proved to be invaluable to our online presence - IBP 9 takes away all the guess work of optimising your site for good search engine positions whilst ARELIS, well, it simply is a real mean machine which can cope brilliantly with your link management strategy.

We cannot praise these two pieces of software highly enough, they are key to the current and future success of our online business."
Graham Roberts, Commercial Loans

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