I've noticed something very suspicious lately when using my Internet Explorer browser. Whenever you directly type a website name into the browser, you don't get to the website directly. What I see is a Bing search engine query result page with the website of course appearing in its organic results.
Not a big deal you say? Its pretty insidious actually. I believe by doing this, Microsoft is inflating its Bing search traffic statistics. Bing is in running in about a distant 3rd place behind Google and Yahoo for search traffic marketshare- That means a lot of revenue potential for Microsoft.
Read more about Microsoft's Bing marketshare news here:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/194852/bing_loses_more_money_as_microsoft_chases_google.html
What is more interesting, and perhaps not surprising is how Microsoft is blatantly and fraudulently trying to make up ground in this critical area.
Nielsen reports more than 9.17 billion searches in February 2010, with Google Search accounting for 65.2 percent of the market share with a total of 5.98 billion searches. Yahoo came in second with 14.1 percent, with a total 1.29 billion searches. Bing is 3rd place with 12.5 percent. AOL accounted for 2.3 percent. Can we believe these figures?
Query "bing fraud" and millions of topics result for that query. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this isn't the first time its accused of unethical business actions.
What this means for businesses employing Internet marketing, and especially Pay-Per-Click and Search Engine Marketing is to stick with Google (and Yahoo to a lesser degree, especially with recent questions surrounding a partnership between Bing and Yahoo). For small business, Google is the only search engine you need to effectively worry about. For larger companies who insist on using many search engines which include lower quality sites like Bing, safeguards must be employed to protect against fraud. Experienced agencies like http://www.49er-consulting.com/ employ best practices to limit fraud exposure across all search engines, even Google.
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V. K.:
ReplyDeleteAre you entering the URL in the Search bar or the Address bar?
If you're actually in the Address bar, then click on Tools, Internet Options. On the Advanced tab, scroll down to "Search from the Address bar." Set the radio button to the line that begins "Do not submit unknown addresses..." (That's the text found in IE 8; look for an obvious "do not search" option in earlier versions of IE.)
Note that if you enter only the domain name, such as "google" without the ".com" at the end, you need to press Ctrl+Enter to automatically add ".com" to the end of the address.
And if all else fails, set Google or another site as the default search engine for Internet Explorer.
-- Timothy J. McGowan
Thanks for the comment, Tim. Yup, I used the address bar with the full URL with the .com. Those are good tips re: Tools>Internet Options. But that being said, it's still pretty pathetic that Microsoft will do this to inflate their Bing traffic this way.
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