Report: Not Optimizing For Bing-Yahoo Means Loss Of Traffic

Nov 22, 2010 at 4:26pm ET by Greg Sterling

From an SEM-SEO resource-allocation perspective focusing on Google historically made lots of sense for small and even medium-sized firms. Some firms didn’t have the bandwidth to address Yahoo, let alone Bing. But after the merger the two now control about 28 percent of all search traffic according recent search market share data from comScore.

So now that there are two, it makes sense to devote resources to the Yahoo-Bing combination. Search ad network Chitika says that many of the publishers on its network — almost 50 percent — are receiving less traffic than they could if they were to pay more attention to BinHoo:

Among the stable of publishers who run Chitika, a staggering 47% are receiving less traffic from Bing and Yahoo than they should be. With a network-wide average of 23.58% of all search traffic coming from a Bing-powered search engine, that’s a lot of missed opportunity, opportunity now coming from a single source.

The company says that, “on average, publishers who don’t optimize for Bing are missing out on a 9.4% bump in traffic.”

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing | Yahoo: Partnerships | Yahoo: Search Ads

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

http://www.footinmouthdisease.net footinmouth

:P it’s been so long since I paid attention to Bing and Yahoo that I’m kinda fuzzy on what examctly is meant by “optimization” for bing…
http://rosmarin-search-marketing.com Myron Rosmarin

Echoing footinmouth – if there are specific recommendations for optimizing a page/site for Bing, this report would have been a good place to share that.
Fluid

One thing I’ve noticed, not right across the board but in certain cases, is that a drop in ranking in Google is accompanied by a rise in Yahoo/Bing (though not the other way around).

That kind of suggests for certain sites it’s one or the other, not both! If there is a way to optimise for Yahoo/Bing that doesn’t ‘damage’ the work put in for Google, then I’d like to hear it, because losing Google ranking just to improve Yahoo/Bing is not an option and we might as well carry on ignoring the latter!
http://CopelandSearchMarketing.com Mike Mueller

I agree with footinmouth and Myron that optimizing for Bingahoo is a bit of a mystery, and a link to a related post with such suggestions would have been helpful. I also agree with Fluid that as Google rankings rise, Bing’s seem to drop.

The actual Chikita article says, ” Simply by opening up their site to allow non-Google search engines to index all pages should result in an almost immediate 21% bump in traffic…” That’s sounds ridiculous. You don’t simply “open up” your site to indexing. My sites are plenty “open” to indexing but that doesn’t necessarily equate with positive Bing rankings.
http://CopelandSearchMarketing.com Mike Mueller

Apologize for the misspellings above…in particular “Chitika.” My spelling is more in line with bananas…
http://www.josebaumbelina.com Joseba Umbelina

Well a high percentage of the SEO you do for Google also works quite well for Yahoo and Bing IMO, so I don’t really see a big problem.

In other hand, you have to be careful because some things like keyword stuffing can work nice in Bing and put you in a risky situtation in Google.

So, yes, have in mind Yahoo and Bing but don’t go crazy with it..