MSN and Yahoo have one of my sites ranking really well on page 1 for my main keywords, yahoo has me ranked between #2-#5 and even shows the site in the search concepts for my main keyword out of 64,600,000 results but Google has me jumping all over between page 13 and 33 with a pr3. My question is if a site ranks this well on the other 2 se's will it usually end up ranking well in Google? The site is just over a year old, has about 30,000 registered members, and doing around 3,000 uniques per day with about 13,000 page views per day, with a large number of return visitors per day, and it's listed in dmoz, alexa, and google directory. It doesn't do any kind of paid links or any black hat stuff so I can't imagine why it would be penalized in Google. I just keep thinking it's just a matter of time for Google to straigten out on it but just don't know.
If you're referring to the site in your signature. I would recommend a more robust Title tag and more on-page SEO. Based on your comments, it sounds like you're doing well with your strategy. Google likes relevant text so add more of that and putting kws in your links will help as well. Good luck
as rbucich said, your website needs a lot of on-page and off-page SEO work done. on-page: headings, titles, keyword positions, layout, unique content, unique content and unique content. off-page: Build more quality links, include keyword in anchor text.
Google tends to more picky about allowing spammy websites onto their first few pages of search results. Google likes to hand out penalties that knock your rankings back 30 - 90 places. They also take longer to give weight to new links to your site. Just keep getting more links while improving your on page seo. Google cares a lot about the quality of your backlinks, while msn and yahoo place more weight on quantity.
I have some sites that appear on page 1 of Yahoo for a search term but not in the top 200 on Google. The SEs are different. I think Yahoo gives more weight to keywords in the URL and domain name than Google so if your keywords are in your domain name I wouldn't be surprised if you do better on Yahoo.
My keywords aren't in my url at all. Anyway getting a bit off topic, wasn't really supposed to be focused on my site rather just in general if msn and yahoo tend to rank a site sooner than google and if google will usually end up following suit.
Actually your problem is opposite with mine, my site can get in top 10 on Google serp but hardly rank in yahoo and msn.. maybe we can change some tips here.
I actually had the same problem as you with a couple other sites I built, rank well in google, not very well at all in yahoo, and non existent in msn lol. They were just small simple straight html sites though were this one is a much larger php/xml dynamic site. Maybe Google just doesn't like the dynamic content, I'm using SEF url's but who knows. I don't know, I'll be the first to admit I don't understand any of them, I'm pretty much in the camp of build a decent site that people want to use and hope the rest falls in place.
Yahoo and MSN will rank you better despite poorer quality links. Google is much more stringent about this. Also, while meta tags don't work in Google anymore, they will still help you somewhat in Yahoo and MSN.
I suggest your website is filtered by Google. Comparing with other search engines, Google has stricter regulations, you need to find a real reason for which this happened!
Usually what I observed with my own is that if a page ranks well in either Yahoo or MSN, it will be the opposite in Google. Well, I can't blame the scenario that I see. First the all the search engines use different algo and another thing is that, ranking in Google is much harder and more competitive, and that's why fluctuation is very obvious.