In January 2012 I wrote an article entitled “Don’t Ignore Bing When Planning Your SEO“, I thought today may be a good time to revisit the topic.
Experian Hitwise have just announced that the Google UK Market Share fell below 90% last month for the first time in 5 years. This represents a fall of almost 1.41% which sounds tiny as a percentage but in real terms it is an enormous shift. The total losses this year are almost 1.7% so we can see that October was a big month in terms of people jumping ship. Why is this?
Whilst the other search engines namely Yahoo, Ask etc have all made small gains the figures indicate that it is the Microsoft search engine ‘Bing’ that has made the most gains. Windows 8 was released last month and naturally has the Bing search as standard bundled with it. This is why we have perhaps seen the big percentage change. Bear in mind however, We are only in November, What will the results look like after Christmas? Microsoft have just released their answer to the iPad, The Microsoft Surface, this product will also be packaged with Bing as standard. This means that come New Year there will be millions of new computers, laptops and tablets all running the latest Windows operating system that is bundled with Bing.
SEO for Bing
I predicted in January that this would happen and it is doing. Microsoft, once the darling of the IT world had fallen from grace but had the massive capital needed to plan a comeback. The gameplan has moved from expensive operating systems to free software and services that are popular and that incorporate an effective search engine. This is how Google make money, they provide a free search facility and allow advertisers to buy placements at the side of the listings, its a multi billion dollar industry and one that Microsoft wants or rather needs to be part of.
So what does this mean to you, the Webmaster? Well for a start it means a headache! If you thought you’d got to grips with pleasing the Googlebot then prepare to meet the Bingbot, an altogether different creature. The good news is, the chappies at Microsoft have been extremely busy creating some rather useful tools to rival the Google Webmaster tools. They have also been busy asking the opinions of Webmasters around the world for their input. I have completed two surveys from Bing in the past month alone one of which was really in depth. If you haven’t already done so then I recommend that you set aside some time to visit the Bing Webmaster pages.
Microsoft mean business, don’t sell your shares in Google just yet, I’m sure that there is room enough for two big players in the search industry and I predict that is exactly what will happen over the next few years, Bing will continue to make gains and Google will continue to lose. This will hopefully make for better search engines, less expensive PPC costs for advertisers and a much more fair and balanced environment for Webmasters.
