When Microsoft and Yahoo finalize their search consolidation sometime 9-12 months from now, nearly 28% of the U.S. search market will create the first “REAL” challenge to the Google search throne.
How do we SEO professionals combat that in our SEO approach for site optimization? It seems that the Bing algorithm is substantially different than the Google algorithm, so do we optimize our sites for only Google still? Or do we perhaps build multiple pages of the same content to appease both search giants?
“You’d effectively have two pages, one for Google and one for Bing,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com.
This could mean a return to the late ’90s when marketers would routinely create pages for Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista & Lycos, and as we currently do for mobile platforms, such as the iPhone.
Five is the new Ten
One of the main challenges for marketers is getting on the top five listings for our key organic search phrases. Whereas Google, shows the top 10 results… Bing only shows the top FIVE results in many cases, along with content groupings of videos, news, etc. Also, with the Google Ten-Pack starting to gain substantial visual impact on the SERP, if you aren’t in the top 5… your business may suffer.
Fundamentally, Google’s algorithms weigh inbound links as very important, while Bing focuses more on the on-page content or the keywords on each page. Keep in mind, that Bing is constantly changing it’s algorithm, so who really knows how it will be when Yahoo starts showing Bing results on its popular web portal.
If Bing/Yahoo are about to retain around a 25% search share, then it will be very hard for many marketers to ignore a strategy for it. When you consider that this is the very first time in many, many years that SEO’s and marketers will be able to optimize their websites for nearly 100% of all search traffic.
“You gauge the amount of effort and investment based on its potential return,” said Gregory Markel, CEO of digital-marketing firm Infuse Creative. “If you are killing it on Google and there is room to grow, or if Twitter is delivering traffic to you, you would maximize them first. But if you wake up one morning and Bing has 30% market share, then that’s a different conversation.”
