The seocontest, as I had intended, was an incredibly informative experience for me. It gave me the opportunity to watch how search engines react to different approaches in SEO, and I watched all search engines closely to see how they all worked, and under “duress”.

I thought I would give a quick rundown of what I noticed about Yahoo!, MSN and Google.

Google - I saw a very high importance being placed on number of backlinks, and I found that often number could trump quality links temporarily. The anchor text of those backlinks is not near as important as would think, though it does give a boost. Use of keywords in content and new content is also helps. Google has a bit of regard to the age of the domain, but this can be circumvented.

MSN is stodgy. Backlinks don’t appear to matter that much, though you will need backlinks to have them find you. They do not crawl near as often as Google. MSN is a very big fan of internal links, as well as content. My site always ranked very well in MSN, but I did not have many backlinks recognized to my site in MSN. MSN does not care about the age of the domain it seems.

Yahoo! seems to be all about domain age, and they really don’t seem to mind nofollow tags at all for backlinks. The domain age issue can be easily circumvented however using an old domain and a 301 redirect, and the change in ranking happens quickly.

So pretty abridged guide I guess, and I am sure I can do more lengthy reporting on all of the topics I just discussed, but generally that is what I saw.

If you want to add to this, or disagree… please comment!