Published on May 18, 2012 Bing v The Penguin
Marketers at Microsoft have launched a multi-million dollar advertising campaign in Australia with the tagline “Bing is for doing” in the wake of a Google algorithm update called Penguin that has seen hundreds of quality websites worldwide, go from page-one to oblivion on the search terms they optimise on.
While Bing’s market share in Australia currently sits at only 7-8% of total web searches, there is a huge opportunity for them to boost their own market share, and change the way that many Australians search for content on the web. If you’re running an online store you can’t afford to ignore this campaign because if it is successful some of may be using it to search for your products and services.
The essence of Bing’s campaign is advertising based and targeted at the Generation Y population, but search engine marketers have reported that regardless of age, following Google’s Penguin update, Bing is returning better quality results for many search terms and that end consumers won’t be able to ignore that – as ultimately people don’t care what search engine they use, just whether they get the things they want from the Internet.
What happened?
On 29 April, Google started rolling out a new algorithm change codenamed “Penguin”, which was designed to penalise business websites that were (in Google’s opinion) over-optimised. The result of the penalties was a lot of quality, high-traffic websites who met one of the new penalty filters for whatever reason were moved from high rankings to low rankings almost overnight. Some businesses report having lost tens of thousands of dollars in traffic and rankings alone from the update.
Google is staying tight-lipped about the exact nature of the algorithm changes but search engine marketing experts seem to agree that Google has penalised sites:
- Who are effectively web spammers using “keyword stuffing” techniques to fill their title and description tags (or page content) with specific words that customers might search on
- With excessive use of a particular search phrase in the body (even if that keyword is the name of the product, trademark or service that the site offers)
- With duplicate content on pages
- That have too many inbound links to them with the same keyword phrase in the link text (unfortunately, this has been applied whether or not the company actually asked those websites to link to them on that keyword)
- With the search phrase in their link to their domain name (e.g. if the company’s business name matches the search phrase)
In addition, Google has also removed the relevancy of links from some blog networks and article directories in determining search rankings, and removed some directories from its rankings altogether – so while sites are not being penalised for links from those sites to them, they are no longer counting those links towards rankings.
Google has offered a form on their website for people to complete if they feel that they have been unfairly treated by the updates, but as the formula Google is using has changed it is unlikely that completing the form would have any impact on a businesses search engine rankings.
Has the quality of Google’s search engine results changed?
Whether the actual quality of search results has changed is for end consumers to decide, but while Google is adamant that the quality of search results has improved post the update on 29 April, that’s not what’s being reported. Search engine marketing forums, our own customers and news reports the world over are all hearing stories of quality business websites going from exceptionally high rankings on Google to rankings for those same search phrases that are now many pages deep. Google says they are targeting web-spam, but these businesses don’t know what they’ve done wrong – they have merely played by the rules that Google has set for many years.
What is Bing doing?
Bing has spent a lot of effort improving their search engine’s relevancy, including offering users a social engine search in the sidebar of search results (separating social network results from regular searches for the convenience of end users). Their new marketing campaign aims to break the habits and entrenched market share that Google has – they’re hoping Google’s latest updates will have search engine marketing companies and end users alike flocking to use Bing in greater numbers than ever before.
Has your site been affected? Check your site on Bing
If you’ve noticed a drop in rankings on Google recently, then check your ranking on Bing. Has your rankings dropped their too? If not, it might be time to put more effort into your rankings on that search engine. After all, if Microsoft are putting money into boosting their market share and their campaign is successful, you can gain more free traffic to your website.
What can you do to optimise your site to improve traffic on Bing?
Experts agree that the factors that affect rankings on Bing the most seem to be:
- The text used on links back to your site and quality of links back to your website (i.e. as long as the website is a good one, you don’t have to worry as much about link text being “over-optimised”
- The age of the domain – the longer you have been in business, the better. You can’t influence this as a start-up, so if you are a startup, focus on links
- The quality of your page descriptions as well as the content of text on the page. Reports suggest that Bing weighs new content less heavily than Google does, but both search engines reward quality content so it’s important to write quality category descriptions, add unique content to your website
Will Bing mug the Penguin?
Bing have a huge opportunity to make considerable market share gains by attracting more consumers to use Bing and therefore more shop owners to optimise for Bing. It’s definitely worth monitoring what’s going on as a store owner, as the importance of Bing is likely to improve in the future.
Built-in authentication for Bing Webmaster Tools for Ozcart websites
If you haven’t signed up for Bing’s Webmaster Tools you will first need to do that. Then, under the search engines menu in your store admin, there’s the option to add the Webmaster tools meta tag to your site. If it doesn’t show up, just submit a support ticket and our team will take care of ensuring it shows up for you.
Once you’ve authenticated, take advantage of the information shown in the tools, and make sure you submit a sitemap to Bing as well (which you can do in the administration area of your Ozcart website).
Bing is poised to make positive inroads into the search engine market and it’s worth watching as a store owner. It won’t beat the Penguin (right now anyway), but it might leave a few bruises.
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