While that may not surprise much of the SEO industry, it contradicts what some Google employees have previously said, as well as another recent study on Wikipedia’s search visibilty.

Last week, Conductor released updated data about Wikipedia’s search visibility, this time including Bing for comparison to its previous study that focused solely on Wikipedia’s Google visibility.

In the previous study, Wikipedia appeared on page one of Google 46 percent of the time, and on page two for 25 percent of the searches/keywords.

In its updated study, Wikipedia appeared on Bing’s page one for 31 percent of searches, and on page two only five percent of the time. The chart below shows Wikipedia’s visibility on Google (blue) and Bing (green) for all 2,000 combined keywords, as well as for the separate informational and transactional keywords.

(Note: The image above is a replacement provided by Conductor because the original image had a typo.)

At various conferences that I’ve attended, Google’s Matt Cutts has mentioned seeing earlier studies that had Bing showing Wikipedia more often in its search results than Google does. He echoed that sentiment in the comments of his Google+ post about Conductor’s earlier study. A recent Search Engine Watch study also suggested that Bing favors Wikipedia more than Google.

Why the discrepancies? It’s likely due to survey methodology, not to mention the rapidly changing search results landscape. (Search results can differ day-to-day, even hour-to-hour, so a study done one month is likely to differ from another study done a month later.)

In its studies, Conductor compared 2,000 informational and transactional keywords of varying word lengths. Navigational keywords were not included because Conductor found very low Wikipedia visibility for those types of keywords.

Bing Still Loves Wikipedia, Just Differently Than Google

Conductor’s recent study did reveal an interesting trend: Even though Wikipedia appears more often on Google’s page one, when Wikipedia does show up on Bing’s page one, it’s at the top of the results more often.

When Wikipedia is one page one, Conductor found it in the top three results 83 percent of the time on Bing, compared to 65 percent on Google.

Conductor also removed one-word queries from its study and found that, overall, Wikipedia appeared about 10 percent more often on Google’s page one than on Bing’s page one.

As I mentioned above, with search results changing so frequently, no study is likely to end the discussion on Wikipedia’s search visibility. But, if nothing else, all of this data related to search visibility — whether it’s Wikipedia or other major sites like Amazon — makes for good industry discussion.

Social Media Examiner announced the results of its fourth annual survey, which this year had replies from more than 3,800 social media marketers around the world.

When asked what other marketing channels they use, search engine optimization (SEO) was the No. 2 response behind e-mail marketing. Paid search — or “online ads” as the survey called it — was far down the list at number six. Sixty-five percent of social media marketers say they use SEO, compared to only 38 percent who use paid search advertising.

B2B social marketers were slightly more likely to do SEO (67 percent) than their B2C counterparts (62 percent).

Going forward, 68 percent of respondents said they’re planning to increase their SEO efforts — a number that’s down slightly from 71 percent in 2011. Only nine percent this year said they have no plans to use SEO.

Only 43 percent of the social media marketers surveyed say they’re planning to increase their use of PPC advertising.

As you’d expect, Facebook was the No. 1 social networking site with 92 percent adoption. Google+ was a distant sixth, but most respondents say they’re planning to use Google+ more in the future. I’ve written up more about that aspect of the study on Marketing Land: Survey: Only 40 Percent Of Marketers Are Using Google+, But Many Plan To Change That.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

For most of the past 18 months or so, Amazon has shown up on the first page of Google search results more often than Wikipedia and currently lands on page one about 40 percent of the time, compared to just over 30 percent for Wikipedia. That’s according to new research from SpyFu, which was published this week in response to our coverage of a Conductor study on Wikipedia’s Google visibility.

As you can see in the chart below, Amazon’s page one visibility on Google has been steadily increasing over the past five years, and sometime around the fall of 2010, Amazon shot past Wikipedia. Aside from two drops, Amazon has stayed higher.

SpyFu used its “SEO Recon database,” which the company says has 699 million Google search results pages (SERPs); for the purpose of this research, SpyFu looked at Google SERPs going back five years.

There’s a caveat, of course: SpyFu says its “keyword selections are more likely to be keywords that people advertise on; they are much more likely to transactional.” The blog post also says that these are likely to be high-volume, high-competition keywords.

SpyFu went beyond page one and looked at what sites have the most visibility in the top 50 results on Google. Wikipedia and Amazon are neck-and-neck there.

Despite the biases in its keyword set, SpyFu’s research mostly confirms the Conductor research on Wikipedia’s visibility level in Google’s search results. It also confirms a separate study from Slingshot SEO.

There’s a lot of other interesting data in the SpyFu research, including some research showing a huge spike in YouTube’s Top 50 Google visibility — a spike that appears to begin not long after Google launched its Panda update.

Google scored a 3.9 overall by their employees while Facebook scored a 3.7. In 2011 Facebook scored a 4.2 and Google scored a 4.1. Although Facebook employees earn about $3,000 more on average than Google employees and although the interview process is harder at Google than Facebook, Googlers in 2012 are more happy with their company than Facebook.

Googlers seem to complain less about long hours and work/life balance issues than Facebook. I guess that comes with Facebook still being in a pre-IPO phase. While Googlers complain more about salary and compensation. Also, more Googlers approve of their CEO when compared to Facebook employees.

Here is the Infographic sent out by Glassdoor on the survey results:

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In fact, according to a new Conductor study, Wikipedia showed up on the first page of Google’s search results only 46 percent of the time in a study using 2,000 unique keywords.

Conductor used one thousand informational keywords (like “lyrics” and “bridal shower ideas”) and another thousand transactional keywords (like “headphones” and “where to find wall stencils”) in its study; as you’d expect, Wikipedia has much more visibility on informational searches than transactional — 60 percent for the former and only 34 percent for the latter. And overall, Wikipedia ranked one page one for 46 percent of the keywords.

Conductor’s study also found that Wikipedia doesn’t rank on page one or two for about 29 percent of the keywords it studied (see right column above).

Wikipedia: Still A Ranking Powerhouse

Even if those numbers are lower than you expected them to be, Wikipedia is still a ranking powerhouse. Conductor’s research shows that, when Wikipedia does show up on page one of Google’s search results, it’s in the top three spots 65 percent of the time (see right pie chart below).

Conductor’s study comes on the heels of a separate study last month suggesting that Wikipedia ranked highly on Google UK for 99 percent of all searches — a study that I suggested was flawed because it relied only one one-word searches. (And, in fact, Conductor’s study shows Wikipedia ranking on page one about 80 percent of the time for those keywords.)

In my article about the previous study, I suggested a different methodology — one that used a variety of keywords from single words (“headphones”) to lengthy phrases (“who built the statue of liberty”). Conductor explains that it used that methodology and, at the suggestion of Search Engine Land columnist Shari Thurow, divided the keywords into transactional and navigational. Conductor says it also examined a group of navigational keywords but Wikipedia wasn’t visible for those terms, so it excluded them from the full study.

Next, we need a similar study run on Bing’s search results so we can compare which search engine actually likes Wikipedia more. (hint, hint, Conductor…)

If you missed the link above, you can read more about the study on Conductor’s blog.

Postscript, March 23: For more on this topic, please see our article Move Over, Wikipedia: Amazon May Be The King Of Google Rankings.

First, the traffic stats:

Experian Hitwise tells us that downstream traffic from msnNOW to Bing jumped 21 percent between the first and second weeks since msnNOW’s launch on February 15th.

That’s in line with a separate report from Compete that says 23 percent of msnNOW users that didn’t visit Bing in the week before launch did visit Bing after using msnNOW. Compete says the largest group of new or re-engaged Bing users are in the 25-34 age group.

msnNOW, if you’re not familiar with it, is a editor-curated site that reports the day’s hot/trending news by tracking the hottest topics that “people are talking about, searching for, and sharing the most” on Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Breakingnews.com (which is an independent unit inside Microsoft’s MSNBC.com service).

One reason it’s driving more traffic to Bing is that, in some of its story coverage, it includes links to get more information via Bing searches. Here’s an example:

This story about the car that Kanye West and Jay-Z used in a music video was on the msnNOW home page last night. Users that clicked-thru got a brief summary of the story (shown above). And that link in the first sentence for the video sends users to watch the video on Bing Videos — ergo, more traffic to Bing.

But Is That Real Search Activity?

Bing may be seeing more traffic thanks to msnNOW, but there’s an issue that will likely come up in the future when we talk about search engine market share. The URL of the msnNOW link is essentially a Bing search URL:

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=otis+jay-z+kanye+west&view=detail&mid=1CC2ECE9019B6F298AD91CC2ECE9019B6F298AD9&first=0&FORM=LKVR1

So, even though a user is clicking from one site to watch a video on Bing, it looks like a search was conducted. That’s similar to how both Yahoo and Bing have used slideshows as searches to artificially inflate their share of overall search activity. That practice eventually prompted comScore to separate its tracking into “core search” and “explicit core search.” The latter doesn’t include activity like slideshows and, presumably, video plays (like shown above) as searches.

To be fair, links like the above aren’t the only way msnNOW users are able to access Bing. Every page on msnNOW, including the home page, has a very noticeable Bing search box at the top.

We may get a better picture of msnNOW’s impact on Bing’s search volume when the next set of statistics comes out, which should be in a couple weeks. Whether the increased traffic from msnNOW equates to Bing gaining in search market share, it is at least getting people onto Bing — the first step toward converting them into actual Bing users.

The data reflect that mobile search usage has nearly 100 percent penetration among smartphone owners, most of whom search at least once a week. Though it’s not made clear in the data released I assume this is browser-based search and does not include search via mobile apps. Google’s browser-based mobile-search share is 97 percent globally, according to StatCounter.

Mobile app usage is also prevalent according to the survey results. Japanese users have the most apps installed (42), while US smartphone owners have an average of 26 apps on their handsets. However in terms of regular usage, Google found that in the US smartphone owners used an average of 11 apps during the past month.

Google also found that smartphone owners were heavy video consumers and social networking users. However the most powerful data in my view reflects how consumers are using smartphones to help make purchase decisions mostly offline.

Google found that 92 percent of smartphone owners in the US seek local (offline) information via their devices, and that 89 percent of those people took some form of action after such a lookup. Beyond this Google said that 25 percent of people in the US made a purchase after a local lookup. In addition, in the US, 51 percent called a business and 48 percent actually went to the business location.

Google also discovered that 63 percent of US smartphone owners made purchases on their smartphones at least monthly, with 20 percent saying they made daily purchases. The study also illustrated consumers’ increasing reliance on smartphones as research tools that influence buying behavior in stores and online.

You can find lots more of the data from the above study here. In addition Google’s Spero offered mobile predictions for 2012:

1. More than 1 billion people will use mobile devices as their primary internet access point.
2. There will be 10 days where >50% of trending search terms will be on mobile
3. Mobile’s role in driving people into stores will be proven and it will blow us away
4. “Mobile driven spend” will emerge as a big category
5. Smartphones will prove exceptional at driving a new consumer behavior
6. Tablets will take their place as the 4th screen
7. New industry standards will make mobile display easy to run
8. 5 new, mobile first companies will reach the Angry Birds level of success
9. The ROI on mobile and tablet advertising will increase as a result of the unmatched relevance of proximity
10. The intersection of mobile and social will spark a dramatic new form of engaging consumers
11. 80% of the largest 2,000 websites globally will have an HTML5 site
12. One million small businesses globally will build a mobile website

For comparison, here are my prior mobile predictions for 2012.

The following were the most frequently searched local content categories in Q4:

Ad performance reported by xAd exceeds comparable online CTRs for both search and display. The network said that average CTRs in Q4 for local search ads were 7 percent, while locally targeted display ads yielded 0.6 CTRs.

Beyond the initial click xAd captures “secondary actions” (i.e., calls, map lookups). The company said that among those who clicked on ads, 37 percent of search clicks and 5 percent of display CTRs delivered these secondary actions.

The secondary actions were further broken down by xAd. Calling a business was the most frequent secondary action taken by local searchers, while maps/directions lookups was the most common action among those clicking on display ads.

Another interesting observation is how display responders (above right) sought more information or reviews but local searchers did not as frequently. This likely indicates the more “directed intent” of search-ad responders vs. display clickers who were being exposed to new information or businesses.

One of the most interesting findings in the xAd report shows how search and display ads reach people at different times of day. While the complementary nature of search and display advertising online is well established, xAd shows by daypart how the two can work together in mobile.

Local search peaks during the middle of the day and declines in the evening. However display exposure peaks “after hours” when people are in leisure mode.

Finally, xAd said that among all mobile subscribers, “mobile browsers are still the primary access method for local-search information.” However for iPhone and Android owners, “in-app access is preferred by a large margin over in-browser access.”

Others have reported similar data, confirming the preference and trend toward apps among smartphone users. “We expect that trend to continue as more users of feature phones switch to smart devices,” explains xAd.

While Google “owns” 95 or more percent of mobile-browser based search the same is not true in the app world, which is more verticalized.

Yikes, right?

Wikipedia — more specifically, Google’s apparent love of Wikipedia — has long been a sore spot in the SEO industry, so seeing a statistic like that is a big pile of salt in the wounds at this point.

But it’s really not a statistic to get worked up about because, in my opinion, the study itself was flawed.

Study Methodology

As Intelligent Position explains, the company used a couple random noun generators to come up with a list of 1,000 nouns — words like “ashtray” and “volcano,” “snowflake” and “melody.” It then did 1,000 unique searches on Google UK and charted if and where Wikipedia showed up in the first page of results.

The results? Wikipedia was on page one for 99 percent of those searches, was the top-ranked result for 56 percent and was in the first five results for 96 percent of those noun searches.

Over on eConsultancy today, Kevin Gibbons makes the point that this shouldn’t be too surprising because Wikipedia does a lot of things right where SEO is concerned: usually very rich/deep content, highly targeted web pages, strong domain authority, loads of inbound links and more.

I don’t argue at all with those points, but I’d add something that seems just as obvious to me: the study only used one-word nouns. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia — in large part, it’s a repository of information about nouns.

With all of that solid SEO in its favor, chances are great that searches for things like “tortoise,” “asphalt” and “liquid” are going to have Wikipedia very high in Google’s results. The Wikipedia page about tortoises is nothing short of amazing. Ditto the pages about asphalt and liquid.

A Suggestion For Different Methodology

Most search queries are longer than one word nouns. Chitika recently pegged queries at between 4.07 and 4.81 words on average, depending on the search engine. A couple months ago, Hitwise reported that 27 percent of searches that produced clicks were one word — leaving 73 percent of searches not represented in this study.

What I’d love to see someone do is this: Do a thousand searches (or more) that represent actual search engine behavior. Make 27 percent of those random searches be a single word (like “tortoise” or “liquid”); make 24 percent be two words (like “buy laptop” or “ankle pain”); make 19 percent be three words (like “u2 song lyrics” or “funny Valentine’s cards”), and so forth up to seven or eight words.

And then, using a variety of search terms that mimics actual search behavior, show how often Wikipedia appears in the first page of results. I’m pretty sure it’ll still be very high, but it won’t be 99 percent of the results.

Based on underlying comScore data, the report analyzes visits to the top five websites in several verticals: Media, Retail, Travel, Auto, Finance and Health. It doesn’t discuss the impact or relative position of Facebook at all, possibly because Facebook is not yet a public company.

Mahaney points out that Google’s retention of the position of top traffic referrer is an accomplishment in a marketplace that is so “fluid” and intensely competitive.

The report has a number of key findings, which I’ve distilled here:

Google ranked as the #1 source of traffic for 23 of the top 30 Websites. “By contrast, the #2 (Yahoo!) and #3 (Microsoft) influencers accounted for 11 percent and 6 percent of traffic to the top 30 Websites.”

Google’s “influence is [very slowly] slipping”: Mahaney said that “Google has gone from delivering 17 percent of all the traffic to the top 30 Websites in 2010 and 2011 to 16 percent in 2012.” The one vertical studied in which Google’s influence has waned considerably is Heath (see chart above).

Yahoo and Microsoft’s traffic is flat: the report said that “Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s share of traffic “has remained essentially flat from 2010 to 2012.” This is regarded as a surprise on both counts.

Mahaney said that flat traffic is positive for Yahoo given the market’s perception of the company/site as a “deteriorating asset.” By contrast this is “arguably something of a negative surprise [for Microsoft] . . . given signs of Bing Search market share gains.”