Will you focus your efforts more heavily on Bing? Discuss.

What Bing Coming to Yahoo Means

It’s important to note that Microsoft and Yahoo still have plenty of details to work out before anyone knows just how the product of this deal will function. We know that Bing will be used in the back-end of searches on Yahoo, but we don’t know what other elements Yahoo will still be incorporating into the search experience. For example, Yahoo said last week that the companies will still be discussing how SearchMonkey and BOSS figure into the mix.

Optimizing for Yahoo is not going to be limited to showing up in Bing’s results. That’s not to say that showing up in Bing’s results won’t have its advantages for Yahoo search, but there is a lot more going on at Yahoo than that. The company has been stressing that it is still very much focused on search, and under the deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will still be controlling the user experience at Yahoo.com.

Right now, Yahoo.com has plenty of elements to consider, from news and trending topics, to a whole slew of “applications” that users can customize on their Yahoo homepage. Among these are Facebook and Flickr. If you want to get in front of Yahoo users, it’s not limited to Yahoo search results. That said, Yahoo search results also have their own thing going on. Keep an eye on the box that appears under the search box after you enter a query. It contains related queries, and “related concepts”. This is one area that could conceivably be independent from Bing (although that remains to be seen at this point). Yahoo is not shy about putting brands in these “related concepts” either. You can find WebProNews in there for a query like “ebusiness news”.

The point is, Yahoo has made it clear that it will continue to control the user experience, and that means there should be plenty of areas within Yahoo that are out of Bing’s control. This leads me to presume that Yahoo will not be something you’ll want to ignore, just because Bing is integrated into it. Remember that at this point, Yahoo controls a much greater percentage of the search market than Bing.

All of that said, you may want to pay closer attention to your Bing rankings if you haven’t done so in the past, because while Yahoo will still be Yahoo to its users, the deal also means there will be significantly more eyeballs on what Bing determines to be the most relevant results to searches.

Why Stop at Google, Yahoo, and Bing?

These may be the biggest three search engines in terms of market share in the United States, but there are still plenty of people using others. For one thing, YouTube is number 2. Not Yahoo or Bing. If you are concerned about simply being found where people are searching, you should have a YouTube presence. That of course means having a video strategy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a huge video budget.

There are still people using Ask as well. In search industry coverage, it often gets overshadowed by the others, but there are still a lot of people using it. In fact, the Ask Network’s market share grew by 6% from December to January. Ask.com’s market share grew by 1%. A lot of people search with AOL. AOL’s search is powered by Google, but it doesn’t always return the same results as Google.

Facebook’s search market share grew by 13% in that same period of time. You may not think about Facebook for search as much, but people are spending more and more time on Facebook, and it stands to reason that they’ll be conducting more and more searches from Facebook. Granted, Facebook’s web search feature is powered by Bing, but that’s only a piece of the Facebook Search puzzle. If you don’t have a Facebook strategy, you may be missing out on a lot more searches. By the way, did you know that Facebook recently passed Yahoo as the 2nd most visited site (just under Google)?

These are just a few examples. People are searching from a lot more places. Rather than just optimizing for Google, Yahoo, and Bing, perhaps you should think about all of the places where your site/business would make sense when a user searches (consider niche sites as well).

Does the Yahoo/Bing deal make optimization easier? Weigh in with your thoughts.

Related posts:

1. Bing, Google, and Yahoo All Making Maps More Interesting
2. Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts
3. Bing Makes Out Well In Search Spend Report

Google

Google allows you to take a virtual tour of the Olympics in 3D. They recently released updates in Google Earth’s 3D Buildings layer, which showcase Olympic venues (54 buildings). Models range from downtown event centers to ski lifts and spectator bleachers. The Official site for the Olympics uses the models itself.

Vectoral Elevation has “an interactive artwork” that allows users to direct light beams and transform Vancouver’s skyline until the end of the month using a custom interface built on Google Earth and Map APIs. It lets users design big light sculptures by directing 20 robotic searchlights located around English Bay.

Google has also taken Street View to Olympics country:

Bing

Microsoft launched a new Bing Maps application that pulls photos from Flickr, associates them with Bing Maps Streetside photos, and overlays them stretching the photo to form fit where in the world it belongs. The app is currently available in Vancouver (among several other places).

Bing actually has a Winter Olympics-specific Maps app as well. “In coordination with NBCOlympics.com, get up to the minute information about the 2010 Winter Olympics in everything from venues to news,” says Bing’s Chris Pendleton. “Click the Venues bar on the left to see the different venues where the events are taking place. Click the Medal Count bar to see every country mapped out with the number of bronze, silver and gold medals awarded to the respective country. Click the Winter Games News and Blogs to get the latest information about the Winter Olympic Games from news sources and bloggers on site. Finally, check out the Winter Games Tweets which filters information from our Twitter Maps application specific to the Olympics.” Bing talks about more Vancouver apps that feature Bing Maps here.

Bing is also giving its home page some Olympics love. It will be updating it with various photos from the events. “And while we’ll show some winners, this won’t be the standard parade of medalists,” says Bing’s Stephanie Horstmanshof. “We’re out to show the great moments from the games: the alpine skier from Ghana, the debut of Ski Cross as an Olympic event, anything to do with curling—all with the stunning imagery that you’ve come to expect on the Bing homepage.”

More ways that Bing and MSN are involved in the Olympics are discussed here.

Yahoo/Flickr

Yahoo has a games-dedicated site, as well as a new Olympic mobile site at m.yahoo.com/olympics. This will provide coverage with live results, upcoming events, medal counts, photos, news, commentary, etc.

Yahoo also has a Yahoo Sports Olympics Coverage app for My Yahoo, that gives you more such information.

On Yahoo’s Flickr, the IOC, the official governing body of the Olympics, has set up their official Olympic photo group for people to share their photos of the events and of Vancouver.

Facebook

The IOC also has an official Olympic Games Page on Facebook. “Through the page, you can stay updated on activities and events at the Games, while sharing your own stories about what the Olympics mean to you,” says Alex Huot, head of social media for the IOC. “You’ll even be able to stay updated on future games even after this year’s Winter Olympics end.”

Alex also encourages people to use Facebook to become a fan of athletes and Olympics teams, play the Vancouver 2010 Official Minigame, and share photos.

Twitter

Twitter has a list of verified athletes from the Olympics who will be tweeting. Fans will of course be tweeting non-stop about things that happen at the Olympics throughout the events.

These are just a few of many ways fans of the Olympics can engage with the events on the web. How are you planning on staying connected?

Related posts:

1. Yahoo And NBC Benefit From Winter Olympics
2. Yahoo Deepens Integration With Facebook
3. Bing, Google, and Yahoo All Making Maps More Interesting

Some of the new features are available today, but some you will have to wait on a little bit. Microsoft highlights the following new features:

• • Streetside Photos application (in technology preview): Available today, this tech preview mines geo-tagged photos from Flickr, and relates them to the Streetside imagery in Bing Maps. As more people contribute and share imagery, we can reunite those photos with the location where they were taken. This application will also enable the layering of historical imagery, so people can go back in time and see a location as it existed decades prior.
  • World Wide Telescope Integration: We’re not just stopping at the street, and are excited to announce our vision for the initial integration with the World Wide Telescope, a project out of Microsoft Research. Once launched, you will literally be able to “walk” outside in Streetside mode, look up, and see what’s above – way above, with constellations coming to life.
  • Indoor Panoramas: At the same time as we’re getting more “universal” with World Wide Telescope, we’re also getting more intimate. Today, we’re showing the first results of our indoor panoramas work. This will provide an experience identical to Streetside, but won’t be limited to places you can take a vehicle. Whether you’re exploring Seattle’s Pike Place Market, or your favorite theme park, Bing Maps will give you the most immersive experience of the place.
  • Video Overlay Technology: MIcrosoft also demonstrated a preview of our new video overlay technology, which enables real-time video to be overlaid seamlessly on street-level imagery, adding another dimension to the mapping experience. In the coming year, we think you will be pleasantly surprised with how far Bing takes this new technology.
    

Meanwhile, Google has introduced Google Maps Labs, similar to Gmail labs, only for maps. Right now there are only 9 features, which you can enable/disable at anytime, but that list is sure to increase greatly over time. Current features include:

- Drag ‘n’ Zoom
- Aerial imagery
- Back to Beta
- Where in the World game
- Rotatable Maps
- What’s Around here?
- LatLng Tooltip
- LatLng Marker
- Smart Zoom

Click the little green flask icon at the top of Google Maps to access these, and see more details about what each one does.

Google is also just finished pushing out an imagery update for Google Earth and Google Maps. More on that here.

As long as we’re talking about Bing and Google, let’s not leave Yahoo out. This week at their SearchSpeak event, they unveiled a mobile app that’s not available yet, but has attracted a fair amount of Buzz. It’s called Sketch-a-Search, and lets users trace areas on maps with their fingers to search for things in that area.

Which search engine has the Maps features you are most interested in? Let us know.

Related posts:

1. Bing Launches New Maps with Apps
2. Will Bing Powering Yahoo Make SEO Easier?
3. Some Ways to Enjoy the 2010 Winter Olympics Online

To give credit where it’s due: Nathania Johnson is the one who got an early look at Efficient Frontier’s report (which is supposed to be released tomorrow).  It’s thanks to her, then, that we know Google’s market share in terms of search advertising spending fell 1.0 percent on a year-over-year basis to 74.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share stayed steady (at 20.4 percent), and Bing’s increased by 1.0 percent (to 5.1 percent).

From Microsoft’s perspective, that represents a move in the right direction, at least.  And it’s interesting, too, that Bing managed to draw revenue away from Google instead of its partner-to-be in Sunnyvale.

As for the future, Johnson wrote, “Bing is expected to grow 30% in 2010, giving them a 6-7% share of paid clicks.”  The outlook for the whole industry seems fairly bright, too, given that she stated, “SEM spend will grow 15-20% in 2010.”

Related Articles:

> Bing Gets New Health Search Features

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Link Building For Bing Rankings: Dos And Don’ts

Related posts:

1. Will Bing Powering Yahoo Make SEO Easier?
2. Retailers Funneling More Money To Bing
3. Bing, Google, and Yahoo All Making Maps More Interesting

Part of the reason behind this decision might be that Microsoft hasn’t bought into the theory that China’s government participated in the hack that upset Google.  Or that it just felt unthreatened by it.

Ballmer told Reuters, “We’re attacked every day from all parts of the world and I think everybody else is too.  We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

But whether Microsoft’s good at defending itself or simply dense, there’s little question that it’s sticking around in China.  In response to a question about leaving the country, Ballmer didn’t give a “maybe” or a “we’ll see.”  He said, “No.”  The CEO then continued, “I don’t understand how that helps anything.  I don’t understand how that helps us and I don’t understand how that helps China.”

Look for Bing to come out of beta and see a wide release in China in the near-ish future, then.

Related Articles:

> Microsoft IE Hole Used In Google China Attacks

> White House Sides With Google In China Standoff

> Yahoo, Adobe Identified As Victims Of China Hack

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Launches Twitter-Esque Service In China
2. Microsoft Announces CFO Changeover
3. US Government Wants China to Investigate Google Attack

Do you see Twitter as important to an effective search marketing campaign? Share your thoughts here.

Google and Microsoft almost simultaneously announced deals with Twitter a few months back, that would give the companies access to tweets in real-time to fuel their respective search engines’ real-time results. Microsoft immediately launched their version, but it was separate from the regular Bing search engine. Google waited a while, but eventually started incorporating real-time results right into regular Google SERPs (including not only tweets, but various other sources).

After the Twitter deals were announced, Bing came out and said, “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.”

Google was not as vocal about how it would rank tweets and other real-time results, but the company has now shed a bit of light on that via an interview with MIT’s Technology Review. David Talbot interviewed Google “Fellow” Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at the company. According to him, Google also ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that some kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But that’s only one factor.

Do you commonly use hashtags in your tweets? If your goal is to rank in Google’s real-time search index, you may want to cut down on that practice, because according to Singhal, that is a big red flag for a lower quality tweet. This seems to be part of Google’s spam control strategy.

Another noteworthy excerpt from the interview:

Another problem: how, if someone is searching for “Obama,” to sift through White House press tweets and thousands of others to find the most timely and topical information. Google scans tweets to find the “signal in the noise,” he says. Such a “signal” might include a new onslaught of tweets and other blogs that mention “Cambridge police” or “Harry Reid” near mentions of “Obama.” By looking out for such signals, Google is able to furnish real-time hits that contain the freshest subject matter even for very common search terms.

Well, we certainly know more about Google’s strategy for tweet ranking now, but there are still plenty of questions about it. What is Google’s stance is on Ghost Tweeting? Are Google’s ranking factors a good reason to create and follow more Twitter lists in hopes for gaining more reputable industry followers?

The factors mentioned aren’t the only ones Google employs. It’s not like Google is going to tell us everything. It also helps to keep in mind that real-time search spans far beyond just tweets. Still, Twitter is clearly a big part of it, and even the significance of tweets themselves will evolve in time.

Google says it hopes to factor in geo-location data (with regards to tweets) into the real-time search results at some point. Google and Twitter engineers frequently collaborate on  real-time search, which Google itself says is evolving.

By the way, it stands to reason that Google’s strategy for ranking tweets probably shares similarities for how it ranks content from other sources drawn from for real-time search.

Is ranking in Google’s real-time search important to your strategy? Discuss here.

Related posts:

1. Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!
2. How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter
3. Bill Gates Surpasses 100,000 Twitter Followers in 8 Hours

Bing recently came out of beta in the UK and we are seeing the beginnings of the advertising campaign to promote it.

For SEOs, however, there is a more immediate opportunity with Bing than hoping it gathers some market share from Google(*). Linkfromdomain is a search operator that is unique to Bing. It returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain. There are obviously other ways of getting this information in raw form (maybe including Linkscape one day, but certainly including Xenu for mid-sized sites), but for large sites especially, it can be really hard to gather it in any kind of usable form.

The usage of linkfromdomain is to search on Bing for something like:

• linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk (returns pages linked from the Oxford University site – more on this below)
• linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk intitle:broadband (filters to broadband in the title)
• linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk wimax (searches for wimax anywhere on the linked-to page)

The set of results is generally returned in a similar ordering to a regular search query – with a combination of highly relevant and more powerful results first. Unfortunately linkfromdomain does not support searches for sub-domains (even www.) you have do search for linkfromdomain:exampledomain.com.

How do you use this for SEO?

This is a linkbuilding tip post – the idea being two-fold:

1. suppose you have a powerful target website (such as an educational institution) and you are seeking ways of getting links from them, this gives you tools for finding techniques, content types and targets for those links (more on this below but it’s very effective for building highly trusted links)
2. sometimes the “one-step-removed” linkbuilding model can work superbly well for identifying linkbuilding targets. If I were running a cooking blog (wait, I do – it took superhuman effort not to drop a shameless link there), it might be a good idea to look at something like this as a superb linkbuilding target list

The information contained in the second approach is typically findable through other means (or the targets are likely to appear on your radar in other ways) and there is a lot of searching through chaff to find wheat. I wanted to run through a worked example today to show you how powerful method #1 can be:

Worked example

I had to pick a niche and a target for my worked example. I decided to imagine I was linkbuilding for a technical but not-specifically-web-related company. I’m trying to get links from trusted authoritative domains so I start with big educational institutions.

As some of you may know, I studied at the University of Cambridge (ending with a year at the Statslab). I don’t want them getting link requests from all you lot, so I picked Oxford (**).

I’m pretending my imaginary client works in some area of telecoms and has resources and technical papers on subjects like wimax and spectrum usage.

First up, wimax:

• Start with the linkfromdomain search: http://www.bing.com/search?q=linkfromdomain%3Aox.ac.uk+wimax&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n
• Pick out an interesting-looking resource: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470510285.html
• Dive over to the labs tools to find ox.ac.uk links to this page: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/backlinks?uri=http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470510285.html&linktype=page
• This highlights this kind of page: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/details.php?id=O08C835H6J

It turns out that conted.ox.ac.uk is a goldmine for linkbuilders. It’s the Continuing Education section of the Oxford University site and seems to be very generous with linking out. I might suggest that my client gives a talk or writes a resource for a CPD course. At the very least, it might be worth creating some content to target this kind of page.

Tip: I find it best to look for links to pages that aren’t homepages because it’s typically easier to find where the link originates from. Bing doesn’t have an effective link: operator meaning that we have to use Yahoo, Linkscape or similar. Because we are then not using the same index, it can be tricky to track down the link found by linkfromdomain.

Another example starting with spectrum auctions – sometimes it’s funny where this kind of research can take you:

• A different linkfromdomain search: http://www.bing.com/search?q=linkfromdomain%3Aox.ac.uk+spectrum+auctions&filt=all&first=11&FORM=PORE
• A different kind of interesting-looking (and, as it happens, off-topic) resource: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/dead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.html
• A demonstration of using Yahoo! instead of labs tools to find the source of the link: http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Farts-entertainment%2Fbooks%2Freviews%2Fdead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.html+site%3Aox.ac.uk&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35
• Leads to a new strategy – find a way to write about this college and drop them a line: http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/news/media.html

(Incidentally, I found a very similar opportunity on the Cambridge site, but no, I’m not going to tell you about it.)

In an unexpected turn of events, I also found some pretty active blogs writing about my target subject matter on ox.ac.uk URLs. Even I’m not mean enough to fill up those guys’ inboxes with outreach from you lot just because they picked the wrong university.

(**) seriously, we don’t get on (US folks, think of the relationship between Duke and UNC) but I’m not encouraging anyone to spam Oxford University. Really. I’m not. Even though the varsity match is this week.

Rand has also written about the uses of linkfromdomain for finding spam you are linking to as well as teasing you with the fact that he “gave up” a similar tip to my worked example above at SMX Advanced.

Technorati Tags

linkbuilding, bing, linkfromdomain

Do you like this post? Yes No

Related posts:

1. Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts
2. Bing Launches New Maps with Apps
3. Wolfram Alpha Open to Other Bing-Like Conversations

However, that’s not to say that Wolfram Alpha is a failure. Not only is it still quite young, it is a much different animal than the average search engine, as has been discussed anytime Wolfram Alpha comes up in conversation. Those who search for the kind of results Wolfram Alpha offers seem generally impressed.

Microsoft recently launched some new features for its Bing search engine, and among those was the integration of some Wolfram Alpha data. Just like that, it seemed to dawn on the search industry that maybe this thing could indeed play a significant role in the future of search, perhaps not as a standalone engine (it’s hard to get the average searcher to go to WolframAlpha.com), but maybe behind the scenes. Maybe the average person has no idea what Wolfram Alpha is, but if they use Bing, they may be using it anyway, and they may really like those results.

WebProNews recently interviewed Javed Panjwani, the Business Development Executive at Wolfram Alpha:

Among other things, Panjwani says that they look forward to more and more of those “kinds of conversations,” as he talks about the engine’s integration with Bing. We can only speculate, but does this mean they will pursue relationships with other search engines? Google perhaps?

I’m not trying to start any rumors about any possible deals or anything, but Wolfram Alpha’s attitude seems quite open to such a thing. As Google likes to “organize the world’s information,” it’s not hard to imagine them being able to use such a “computation engine.” It could be at least as useful as the real-time results they’re now indexing.

People have no doubt suggested the possibility of such a match-up in the past, particularly after the Bing deal was brought into the public eye. This could be something to keep an eye on. We’ve seen repeatedly now that Google does not want to be upstaged by Bing.

Related Articles:

> Moving Beyond Google

> Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

> Wolfram Alpha Provides Financial Answers Based on Xignite Info

Related posts:

1. Bing Integrates Wolfram Alpha in Search Results
2. Bing Launches New Maps with Apps
3. Retailers Funneling More Money To Bing

“The new Bing Maps experience also features innovative new mapping applications such as Twitter Maps for real-time updates by area and Local Lens featuring hyperlocal, neighborhood content,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. There are a number of interesting apps available, which is easily the most interesting part about Bing’s new Maps experience:

It will be quite interesting to see what other kinds of apps become available. There is a lot of potential in that department. Watch this clip (Silverlight) about the new Bing Maps:

Maps aren’t the only area where Bing is doing some new things. Other new features Bing features that will be rolling out over the next few days include:

- A new Bing Windows mobile application featuring improved auto-locate and voice search, available for download at http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile.

- The new Bing toolbar which flags online content and alerts you when you’re about to make a purchase that qualifies for Bing cashback savings, available for download at http://www.discoverbing.com/toolbar.

- A social network Visual Search experience — by integrating Facebook and Twitter feeds, Bing Visual Search allows you to quickly find your status updates of your friends and followers, sort by upcoming birthdays and more. This is coming soon at http://www.bing.com/visualsearch.

The Behind Bing site that Microsoft recently introduced has additional information on Bing’s new features. The site was set up to keep users informed about what Bing is up to.

Related Articles:

> Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

> Yahoo and Microsoft May Be Close to Signing

> Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts on Publisher Searches

Related posts:

1. Bing, Google, and Yahoo All Making Maps More Interesting
2. Retailers Funneling More Money To Bing
3. Microsoft Launches Twitter-Esque Service In China

What do you make of Bing’s increasing popularity?  Let us know in the comments section.

Or, to be more precise, “Retailers have spent 47% more on search ads on Bing in Q4 this year than during this same time period in 2008,” according to SearchIgnite.  “Compared with Google and Yahoo!, Bing also saw better YoY click volume growth.”

Additionally, “[a]verage order values on Bing are 21% higher than across all engines, which could account for the spend growth.”

Impressive, right?  It’s only when you sort of step back for a moment that Bing’s achievements look less stunning.  That’s because, despite the progress Microsoft has made, exactly 75 percent of advertisers’ dollars went to Google during the first part of this quarter, and 16 percent headed to Yahoo.  Bing grabbed just 8 percent.

Still, some headway is better than none, and retailers are demonstrating a lot of confidence in Bing by giving it a try during the all-important holiday season.

Will retailers benefit by paying more attention to Bing?  Have your say.

Related Articles:

> Microsoft Takes Users Behind Bing

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts On Publisher Searches

Related posts:

1. Bing Launches New Maps with Apps
2. Bing, Google Increase Market Share While Yahoo Declines
3. Bing Makes Out Well In Search Spend Report