Businesses are being warned to start developing SEO strategies for Microsoft’s Bing search engine if they haven’t already done so, after Google chief executive Eric Schmidt admitted the relatively new product is its main competitor.
The comments come as Google has been slammed with a defamation lawsuit in France, with a court finding the company defamed an individual by providing certain suggestive phrases when his name was entered into the search engine.
Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal last week the company is eying off Microsoft as its main rival, instead of tech giants Apple and Facebook. While he praised both companies, he admitted that “we consider neither to be a competitive threat”.
“Absolutely, our competitor is Bing. Bing is a well-run, highly competitive search engine,” he said, noting the engine has increased its market share over the past year.
Numbers from Nielsen confirm Bing, along with Microsoft’s other MSN and Windows Live products, controlled 13.9% of the US search market during August. That represents a 0.25% increase from July, well ahead of Yahoo’s 1.2% decline during the same month.
And while Google dominates the market with a 65.1% share, Microsoft has managed to increase its share from 10.7% in August 2009 to 13.9% in August 2010. During the same time, Yahoo dropped by 2.9%.
Jasmine Batra of Arrow Internet Marketing says businesses need to start taking Bing seriously. She says SMEs need to start comparing their Bing and Google strategies and develop strategies for appearing highly in both.
“The total share of traffic coming from Bing is not as significant as the traffic from Google, but it is definitely growing. Microsoft is putting the marketing dollars behind it, and they have introduced some good new products as well.”
“There are similarities between all the search engines, but Bing has some particular ways of ranking that are different. Bing pays a lot of importance to domain name matching with keywords, so it’s important to have your domain names and architecture relevant to your site.”
Batra also reminds businesses that Bing is more of a decision engine than a search engine, meaning information about products and services will appear higher than Wikipedia entries. This means businesses need to optimise their sites for key phrases, rather than individual keywords.
Bing will also display only one search result if it is fairly sure it knows what a user is searching for. For example, “Facebook” searches will only bring up Facebook.com and not any other related sites. As a result, businesses need to try and be as specific as possible.
“There are some differences to Google in this way. Google takes things like link popularity into account, which means the weight given to certain links is not as prominent in Bing as it would be in Google.”
“The solution is to just check your keyword optimisation in both websites. See where your keywords rank in each, and then adjust your strategies based on that information.”
Meanwhile, Schmidt has been having trouble of his own, with a French court convicting him and the company of defamation regarding results gathered from its “suggest” function.
French legal affairs site Legalis.net has reported the function, which suggests options as users type, included the words “rapist” and “Satanist” when the plaintiff’s name was entered into the search engine.
The court heard that the plaintiff had been convicted in an appeal case to a three-year jail sentence, but that conviction was not yet finalised when the Google results were found. As a result, the court found the suggestions were defamatory.
The company was ordered to make a payment of one Euro in damages, and ensure the mistake doesn’t happen again. Google told AFP it will be appealing the decision.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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