We have seen in the past few years Bing growing leaps and bounds in the search market. However, the growth really isn’t coming from Google’s market share, though it has nibbled some away. Instead Bing is growing because it is cannibalizing its partner Yahoo!

Growth is growth though, and Bing is becoming a significant player in the search industry. As a search marketer this is obviously very important to me. I personally don’t care how my users find my website (Google, Bing, or their mother), just that they do find it.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan reported today that Google setup a “honeypot” to prove that Bing is copying its search results. According to Danny’s article Bing does not deny Google’s allegations:

“Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites. This “Google experiment” seems like a hack to confuse and manipulate some of these signals.”

I actually believe this isn’t far from the truth!

Related Posts:

• A Case Study Showing How Bing is Inferior to Google
• Google Trap Proves Bing is Copying
• Website Cloaking At Its Worst
• Google Has Penalized Themselves
• A Strong Case For Google+

I was cleaning off my computer desktop this morning and came across the below graphic. I read hundreds of seo websites each day (both for work and recreation), so I have no idea who to credit this image to or how accurate it is—we all know this isn’t something Google published themselves. Even if it isn’t official, it does a great job portraying my own personal websites and exactly how much traffic they receive depending on their rankings. Hope it helps! ~Paul W.

traffic-by-rank

cloaking-ff

I remember back in 2003 learning about cloaking to help your search engine ranking. The basic concept is that you give the search engine bots a different page than what you give a real live person. I recall reading at that time that cloaking wasn’t yet determined to be black hat.

However, six years later, cloaking has been firmly established by the search engines as deep, solid, black hat seo. If you get caught you can guarantee you will be booted from the search index.

googlolopoloy (click on the links to see the top 100 google results)

My good friend over at The Flaming Monkey Nostrils Blog (you’ve got to love blog names these days) brought this to my attention about 20 minutes ago. He had me do a search for “google keyword tool” and google.com doesn’t show up. I always use the google keyword tool and usually type in “keyword tool,” since they always rank #1. However, when I did a search they did not show up.

I then tried google translate, google labs, google analytics, google maps, and google earth. Not one had the dot com show up. The dot uk or dot org might show up but never the dot com. The real kicker was when I did a search for just Google and only the dot org showed up in the top 100 results. I can only imagine that google’s own algorythm has penalized its very own domain. That’s a big fat FAIL on Google’s part!

Recently I was asked by a friend: “What do you think is the greatest way to become well known on the web?” I thought this was a post worthy question, and something I have recently given great thought to.

Obviously, using SEO with a lot of my websites I would advise becoming number one in Google. However, this really isn’t the right answer to the question; nor, is it a good answer. It isn’t difficult to rank high in the search engines, but just because you are able to rank doesn’t mean people will remember you. I personally can think of several of my own sites that rank number one but are far from rememable!

To me the real answer to this question is—originality and foresight. It sounds like an easy answer, but it seems a lot of people struggle coming to a similar conclusion. The Internet is littered with unoriginal spammy sales pages that will do anything to get your credit card and email, in order to bother you for eternity (check out: BuyMyStupideBook.com to see a great parody on this aspect of the web). This being the case, the web is starving for originality/foresight.