I’ve been ignoring Bing as a search engine, mostly because it’s made by the evil Microsoft. However, it’s now overtaken Yahoo for most of our clients sites as the second largest search engine referrer. That is no threat to Google as the Big G still takes about 90% of the search engine credit, but I’m surprised it’s overtaken Yahoo so rapidly. It could still be the novelty factor, but it could also indicate real competition.

So, not to be left out in the cold, the key factors for number one websites in Bing seem to be:

• having an old domain name
• having quality inbound links, specifically from pages that have the same keywords in the title
• then the usual good amount of quality content (I’ve read Bing likes more than 300 words on a page), clean code and a sitemap

If you’ve done a good job of optimising your site for Google then your rankings shouldn’t be too different for Bing. If you’ve got loads of spammy links holding your website up in Google then these won’t help you in Bing. Bing seems to like better qualified links than Google – it’s about time!

Read more over at Bing

This morning we had a client lose all of the hard work we’ve applied for the last four months. This client was making their way up the rankings for a number of competitive keywords and were sitting at page two in Google, about to make it into the first page. Then disaster. Not on page two, three, four or five, but relegated to page six, and for some terms, past page ten!

It smelt like a Google penalty, in particular a -50 penalty. But I didn’t understand, we hadn’t purchased any links, all of the links we obtained were on topic, relevant, using a range of anchor text. So I went to the source to see the outcome. Googling the clients URL I discovered they had over 600 links, amazing since we’ve only created about 60 for them, six months ago they had about 70, so something odd was going on. Close inspection of the sites linking to them revealed a heap, I’d be guessing at least 500 sites, were other Australian businesses with links pages.

And then it twigged. I’d remembered the client was involved in the Traffic Accelerator Program last year. They hadn’t created a links page themself, but every month they were emailed a list of websites to link to, including the anchor text and description.  So presumably, all the other companies involved in the program had also been emailed my clients details and asked to add them to their links pages.

That means about 500 sites are linking to my client with exactly the same anchor text and description. Clearly Google doesn’t like that, so they’ve updated the algorithm.

These pages are spammy, but more importantly they are just not useful – they add no value for anyone! The title on the pages is either links, resources, useful links, useful websites, or some other red flag that says to Google “I am spam” or something to that effect. They link to other websites that are completely unrelated to each other and provide no value to the user whatsoever. If you Google the URL of any of the sites in the Netregistry Traffic Accelerator video you will see the what I mean. Obviously for the companies that appear in the video their sites are strong enough to take take the penalty, which indicates they have a number of links that outweigh the spammy links, but for most in the program, these links would be all they had.

I’ve always maintained links pages and reciprocal linking are a waste of time. Now it seems they are detrimental.

If you have a Google account, you’ve probably noticed the new buttons on your search results:

What do these mean for the future of search engine optimisers? Well, it seems Google is finally yielding to the fact they can’t create the perfect algorithm, they still need human input. Whilst there is no official line the promote or remove buttons will have any effect on a website, it’s only a matter of time before Google use the data and the SERPs will start to produce results based on promote and remove.

And why not. It will encourage businesses and website owners to create useful content, and hopefully banish spammy sites to the black hole. Just think about all the crap websites you currently have to sift through that just happen to be good at SEO, but provide no real value, this is a way to reduce them.

Will the system be gamed? Of course we’ve already heard the urban myth of SEO agencies outsourcing to China and having lots of people search for and click on their websites across internet cafes, so you’d assume this would be the next step. Except they’ll each have to have their own Google account, no big drama, but the different accounts would need to register a different promote and remove vote from different IP addresses, meaning one person would need to login to one account, promote or remove, then go to another internet cafe, login to another Google account, perform another promote or remove and so forth – not time effective at all. I’m sure if a heap of different accounts were promoting and removing the same websites from the same IP address Google would notice (at least I hope they would!). Or I guess you could have a range of IP addresses and move around from computer to computer for different accounts – not an easy setup and I’m actually imagining it would seem a bit futuristic sci-fi. It would be cheaper to just create some decent content…I can’t imagine it would be worth the investment for the outcome.

So, fingers crossed for Google working the promote and remove feature in their search engine results.

Google have added a new Beta tool called Google Insights for Search. It’s sensational. With a quick search you can see the regional differences between keywords. For instance, in the last 30 days more people in Victoria are searching for SEO than those in Sydney. And according to this tool, no one is searching for “search engine optimisation” anymore, interestingly it seems “search engine marketing” is no longer popular either (which kind of goes against my other data).

It’s a quick tool with an easy to understand graph that should really be used for more less serious searches or in this case political searches, so here goes. Over the last 90 days more people in Northern Territory, Tasmania and SA have been searching for “Olympics” than those in the Eastern Seaboard.

But when it comes to “Tibet”, the Eastern Seaboard leads the way, with no searches from NT or Tasmania.

I’ll let you make your own assumptions…

Google continues to be the dominant player in the Australian search engine landscape, with Hitwise reporting another hike in its popularity.

Last month, 87.81% of all Australian search engine queries were through Google. They’ve taken back some of Yahoo’s share, but have mostly reduced MSN’s search traffic since June 07 to half.

In the last year Google have gained 12% of a very competitive stake. Will they be able to grab the remaining 12% of the Australian search market? I doubt it, but the way these trends are pointing, it looks like it might just be possible.

View the stats over at Hitwise.