This blog is actually a result of me misremembering a possible blog title that was on our list of suggestions. I’ve actually concatenated two titles, but it should do the trick in covering what I wanted to talk about.

So, in thinking about the title that I remembered wrong, my answer to the question was at first "It isn’t!" and then I considered my answer a bit more carefully, and realised that whilst when we do a site optimisation we don’t specifically do anything to target Google above other engines (more on this from Rand at SEOMoz), at least initially.

But there are things that we do that we know impacts mostly on the Google rankings, or perhaps with a more marked result on the Google rankings. And after all, with Google having such a large slice of the search pie they are the best engine to concentrate on for incremental gains because the website traffic boost is considerable.

Now that the Supplemental Index is no longer in existence it is more difficult for SEO experts to work out which pages are those of low value. This is one of the reasons that Toolbar Page Rank is so debated over because it is the one visible measure available to SEO agencies and their clients. However, this identification of low value pages is important, because it allows us to identify crawling issues with sites.

Crawling issues and concentrations of low value pages can make a big difference in Google, and we have had several startling results from the removal of poorly ranked content pages. Likewise, duplicate content is a killer on Google in the dramatic way that we see increases when it is cleaned up. So for Google, knowing you way around robots.txt, NOFOLLOW  and 301 redirects is pretty important.

For us SEO agencies in the UK, we also know that the geolocation of the site can make a huge difference – for a UK market it is essential to have a .co.uk or be hosted in the UK. Again, we have examples of drastic changes in Google results when this is addressed.

So, yes, Google SEO is different, even on just the on-page factors (or rather on-site factors) that I have listed here. For off-page, Google also reacts slightly differently, as it has a liking for authority sites, and links from authority sites. It also picks up on new incoming links much quicker, so you can see results much quicker in Google than in Yahoo or MSN.