I was going over various sphinns when I came across Goats Apples and Link building – I like inventive headlines, so I went ahead to read the story  – and came across this SEOmoz comment referenced in the post:

“I knew the reciprocal linking we were doing was over kill and done only to improve our rankings. I did not see any real benefit to my visitors... The problem I have is that a bunch of my competitors... are still getting away with it.”

Unfortunately, the exact link to the comment wasn’t referenced, and being the nosy git I am, I decided to look for it. With surprising results.

My first step was to select a unique set of words in a sequence:

“over  kill  done  only  improve  our  rankings”

I then plugged these into the SEOmoz site search facility powered by Yahoo!, with these results.  Yep, that’s right – not only wasn’t the comment anywhere, the whole darn post wasn’t in the SERP’s.

So, what next? Scoot over to the big G. Not only did I get the entry as the first result, but with the added benefit of the highlighted element in the cached version of the page, I found the exact comment without much difficulty.

It's kind of obvious which SE produced the better results. In my opinion, there would be no better argument for using the Google site search facility as opposed to Yahoo’s, regardless of what any satisfaction survey says.  And one of the main points to remember is that the Yahoo test was carried out by using the default setting of only searching for information within SEOmoz, while the Google search was across the web.

Funnily enough, searching part of the title (How to Handle a Google Penalty - And, an Example from the) of the actual post in Yahoo across the web pulled up the Search Engine Watch mention of it. The actual article wasn’t in the first 50 results (after which I got bored of looking for it). Search in Google – hey, Presto! No.1. 

Maybe Yahoo isnt just good with long tail searches. Or maybe it's just, well, you know.