So I had a problem with Bing claiming to help you make decisions (see Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine.) But a recent post by Benj Arriola from BusinessOnLine really put the nail in the coffin.

Through a tip from an SEO friend, Benj demonstrated in a simple search test that Bing search results are way biased, or inadequate for a major search engine, or both. The test consisted of searching for the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” in each of the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engine. A very reasonable task, I should add.

Guess what the results were? In a nutshell:

• Google search engine: Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results. No surprise because that’s what you’d expect for well-known sites.
• Yahoo search engine: Same expected results. Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results.
• Bing search engine. The search on “Google” gives a single result on google.com. The search on “Yahoo” gives a single result on yahoo.com. But the search on “Microsoft” yields plenty of results on both the company and its various products and services!

You can test all of this by conducting the searches yourselves. It’s totally duplicable, at least for now. Below are my own tests.

Google search engine results.

Yahoo search engine results.

Bing search engine results.

These are real funny results. Heck, the term “yak” (or substitute your own term) returns more results than “Google” and “Yahoo” combined, according to Bing.

Oh and another thing. If you look at Bing’s search results for “Google” and “Yahoo” you’ll see to the right of the single result in each case is a list of similar search engines. And Bing is at the top of this list. But when you search for “Bing” on Bing, there is no list for alternative search engines to be seen anywhere. It’s like google and Yahoo don’t exist. Pretty odd.

The bottom line: I don’t think users of Bing is getting unbiased search results. You can make your own conclusion.

Read Benj’s post “Should I Trust Bing’s Search Engine Results?“

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Bing Is Not Showing All Results in a Bing Search

Web page titles are an important element of getting traffic to your site for the following reasons:

• Page title is one of the few elements search engines show in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Therefore the words in the page title do carry significant authority in the subject matter of your web page content.
• Because page titles are representative of the content on a page, it’s an effective technique to link to pages using their page title as the link anchor text. This is another SEO technique discussed in another post on link anchor text, and it directly influences click-through rate (CTR).
• On a SERP, more informative page titles are likely to attract clicks from a searcher because it meets his search needs. Good, descriptive titles stimulate an emotional response and promise to the searcher that what he is looking for can be had by clicking on your search result. This is a key differentiator between your site and other sites listed on the same SERP.

It is recommended that your page titles be different from page to page on your site. And when pages have similar content, thus causing similar sounding page titles, try to creatively vary the keywords within the title so it is clear that the 2 titles are different and represent 2 different pages.

In addition, the format, order, and word selection of the words in your page title should be somewhat different than the words in your page meta description and on page headers.

Finally, if you look at a typical Google search result page, you’ll notice that Google does not display the page title beyond 65-70 characters. Therefore your title should fit within 65-70 characters and anything beyond that will be cut off by the search engine. You may still write longer than this character budget to provide great user experience for your web visitors, but be sure to put all important keywords up front before the 70th character.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Ensure Google and SEO Friendly Page Title