BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» Microsoft

Will Google Copy Bing with Categories on the Side Bar?

Benj Arriola — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:29:04 +0000

Google Starts Trends

The early days of search pre-Google days were all about crowded interfaces with tons of things going on the page. This was when the main players in the space were Yahoo and Altavista, and those trying to keep up with the page were Excite, Hotbot, Lycos and other. Many of them started with categories displayed since most of these search engines really started as directories.

January 1997 screenshot of Yahoo taken by Ice House Designs

Every other search engine seemed to go into that direction. Categories make sense that it should help guide you drill down into what you are looking for. Then when Google comes out, it take a totally different approach and keeps it clean. Removes all types of categorization and uses the power of search. Google from the very beginning was banking on the fact that their search is sooo powerful, it is easy to drill down into what you are looking for by simply typing in your search query and that their results are so relevant, you do not need to drill down that deep.

Google Beta in 1999 - Screenshot by Chron Tech Blog.

Yahoo and Microsoft Copy Google

The minimalist, clean, simple interface has always worked with Google. Showing the robustness of their search engine algorithm more than anything else that many people really liked which is responsible for all of Google initial boost to success. So if that is the proper formula, they are probably doing something good, so Yahoo and Microsoft have briefly tried it out. Yahoo still has their clean version still up on http://search.yahoo.com.

Yahoo's Clean Search Interface

It was difficult finding old screenshots, and here is one of the older versions of Microsoft Live Search with the clean interface.

Old Microsoft Live Search with a simple clean interface. Screenshot saved by Guardian.co.uk.

Was Clusty First?

After some time, even if Yahoo and Microsoft made the Google looking search interfaces, it didn’t seem to work for them the same way it was working for Google since they never stuck to that interface. The default Yahoo.com screen is still busy as even. Microsoft kept MSN still busy, killed Live search and made Bing simply with a big random postcard at the back of it. Through the years everyone was also copying the standard search result layout. Where organic results were, and were sponsored listings are along with accompanying eyetracking heatmap data proving their effectiveness. Probably not many of you now about Clusty, I have no accurate data saying they were the first to do this, but as far as I remember, Clusty was the first I saw displaying search results with clusters, hence the name Clusty. These cluster were nothing but categories of the search results which can guide users to drill down on what they are really looking for.

Sample search results of Clusty showing it's search result categories.

Although drill downs were implemented in some way on Google, Yahoo and MSN as related searches and not really categories and were not highlighted on the sidebar. Today, Live Search and now Bing makes it a standard. They have been moving away from the minimalist search result interface and started integrating a lot in the search engine results. And as I have seen their presentations in various conferences, they back up their search results layout that has categories on the side with eye tracking heat map data and other user testing saying that these categories really help users get to what they are searching for. Are they right? Maybe, they could be. And it even reaches a point that Google might consider this as well. Right now there are tons of post talking about the preview of Google’s new search result interface showing a side bar. It does not seem to be categories, but just repositioning the Web, Images, Video, News, etc options from the top to the side. I first read about it here, hat tip to AJ Batac, but somehow I am not able to recreate this on my browsers. I search online about this and there are numerous post about it and I guess the post would not get this many if it didn’t work at all, but it supposed to look like this:

Google Search Result Interface with Sidebar. Screenshot by AJ Batac for The Web Shop.

Can you recreate the new Google sidebar search result layout? If you can what did you do? If you think this is a hoax, tell me about it also. Share your thoughts.

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MSN, then Live, now Bing – What do SEOs need to know?

Benj Arriola — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:12:00 +0000

Microsoft has remodeled their search engine over and over again. The Microsoft Network, or MSN whose origins started as an ISP and an online portal when Windows 95 was launched, grew into a search engine that was always trailing as the 3rd most used search engine behind Google and Yahoo in terms of search engine usage with the United States.

From MSN.com to Live.com and finally Bing.com, it is now branding itself as a “decision engine.” Do they mean Bing has some unique decision algorithm in giving relevant results and that it can decide on what are the best sites for you to look at? Not really. It is a decision engine that gives you various types of results that may help you decide on what you are looking for. In my opinion this just sounds like Google Universal Search Results, they just gave it a new name (from Live to Bing) and slapped a full marketing campaign on various advertising mediums to spread the word of the Gospel of Bing everywhere.

Should I even care about Bing?

From daily SEO interactions with SEO friends working at an SEO firm, SEO friends on forums I interact with daily, to some SEO competitors who joined Sulumits Retsambew SEO Contest, a large percent of SEO professionals do not even care about Bing because they believe Google has the majority search usage worldwide. Based on some research data by comScore, last April 2009, Google websites receive about 8 times more search queries than Microsoft websites.

Is this the case forever? We cannot really say since Microsoft is really pushing their search engine in this all out marketing campaign for Bing. There are some sites showing Bing gaining in market share. As for the usage, several news sites and blogs are showing an increase in Bing search traffic but this can still be due to the campaign that makes everyone curious about Bing, thus everyone checks it out. In the end, it will still boil down to how pleased the search engine users are in being able to look for what they are searching for. So we still have yet to see in the next few months if Bing’s traffic sticks, continues to increase or will drop again to being only the 3rd most used search engine again.

Going back to the question: should you even care about Bing? Well, if Bing is only 8.2% of all search queries, this can still be a big number. The US has 220 million Internet users and about 73% of those use search engines for shopping. That is an estimated 13 million people searching with Bing in the US. Still a large market to target. Ok, you can say my numbers are not accurate. My B2C Local Business Search data was from Nielsen back in September 2007, but even 50% of 13 million is still a significant amount of people using Bing.

I’m an SEO and what do I need to know about Bing?

Ok SEO people, what do we need to know? Since Live.com, we have been seeing Microsoft reach out to SEO people, when they came out with their own XML Sitemap submission area, with some basic top 5 backlink info, and making an MS Excel plugin for keyword research from Microsoft’s AdCenter. Now with Bing, they have released a Bing webmaster guideline document for the SEO people that care about Bing.

Most SEO concepts are the same throughout search engines. Good SEO best practices are valid for most search engines. And in this 24 pages of information of Bing’s webmaster guidelines, after reading all of it, I will try to sum it up into 3 key bullet points that may be unique to Bing:

Target Category Keywords that appear on the upper left of the SERPs. You want to make sure you appear on all of them that are good converting keywords for your business. People usually narrow down search results by adding in keyword modifiers and Bing suggest these, so that people do not have to think or type and may find it convenient to click. It is even placed on the top left sidebar where navigational menus people normally click on.
Optimize the Document Preview of your pages. All SEO people know that the Title tag and Meta description tag does not only help in the ranking process but if written well, these can be more compelling to click and increases CTR. Now aside from these two, Bing now has the Document preview which based on current observations it is pulling in the initial content found on the page. Thus, for your first few paragraphs, it would be ideal to write something very unique that compels users to click on.Having your address and phone number which is a normal practice for Local SEO is a good thing since Document Preview will try to look for this information and place it in the preview window.
If you do not want this feature enabled, you can use the nopreview tag.
Implement SEO Flash Best Practices. Bing has expressed their sophistication in this technology by specifically stating the following:

When titles and/or Meta descriptions don’t exist on an HTML page, at runtime Bing creates a best-effort caption from relevant external sources of reliable information to populate the caption with meaningful data for the searcher. Bing, in the effort to improve searcher experience and avoid empty captions, can even construct captions using keyword inbound link text from external, authoritative websites to help create basic captions where no publisher data exists.

Initially this sounds good. But sometimes any information based on other websites may give you a limited amount of control. Every business has enemies and sometimes even if the enemies are a minority, they can sometimes be the “noisiest” online and could be creating a significant amount of negative publicity for your business. You do not want Bing to show this information thus as a precautionary measure: always do Flash properly.

Everything else mentioned in their webmaster guideline whitepaper is all standard SEO best practices applicable to other search engines, such as good content, unique title tags and Meta tags, avoid duplicate content, etc.

So if you know SEO already these are the 3 main differences you might want to look at when optimizing for Bing.

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MSN Search Engine is out of Touch with Reality

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:40:00 +0000

Steve Ballmer, chief executive for Microsoft, said today that MSN is in an advantageous position in search because they have the freedom to experiment while Google has to “play it safe” based on the size of their organization and the success of their business model.

Earth to Steve, your search engine is not competitive to Google’s because that’s all they do is experiment with new search technology. And they hire the smartest people to do it. It was Google that was the first to push Universal Search, which was a huge change to the way people searched for things. It was Google that came out with Webmaster Tools that enabled site owners to better understand how the search engine was indexing their site. It was Google that first used a quality score to influence PPC results. It was Google that came out with the Big Daddy update that solved a lot of canonicalization problems that MSNs engine still chokes on.

MSN/Live Search to my knowledge hasn’t done much to innovate search. Thier MSN live experiment was a huge failure. They had a directory and then closed it. They still can’t figure out redirects as well as Google or even Yahoo. The fact that their results are so influenced by on page factors makes them more susceptible to spam, scrappers and other black hat SEO techniques. They never have organic search engines at conferences to help Webmasters but they definately have advertising reps if you wanna spend money. The whole culture that MSN portrays is an organization that can’t move because its so big that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Google on the other hand projects a young, innovative culture that “gets it”.

If MSN is ever going to become competitive in this space, they need to get a grasp on how far behind they are and spend more time actually creating search technology innovations that resonate with users. Rather than having their chief executive officer say things like “Our search does not need to be all things to all people.” I mean what does that say? We only care about some people? It’s certainly not a winning philosophy when your trying to compete with Google and you have the resources that Microsoft does.

My other recommendation to Microsoft… buy Twitter. At least then you would own something that people actually cared about.

That’s my MSN rant for a Friday. Hope to see everyone at SES New York next week. I will be speaking in the first session after Guy’s opening keynote presentation. The session is entitled “Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers”. See ya in NYC!

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A Visual Comparison of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:29:00 +0000

All the noise today about Microsoft dropping it’s bid for Yahoo (hopefully it stays that way) inspired me today to take another look at the differences between the search engines and why one (Google) is utterly dominating the competition (Yahoo and MSN). And suddenly as I looked around the office and noticed some of the “swag” that my fellow BOLers had picked up from the search engines at various conferences, I was immediately struck by the obvious. The bottom line is, company culture has everything to do with why one company is winning and the others are losing. And that culture ironically is perfectly illustrated in the following picture. Google uses sophisticated technology and spends the money to do things right, Yahoo has some clever ideas but they aren’t quite up to speed, and MSN is still lost in the past:

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Mystery of the Viewstate Variable – Does It Really Affect SEO?

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:57:00 +0000

One of the more interesting questions that has emerged recently in the world of SEO is the mystery of the Viewstate variable. This handy little invention of Microsoft’s twisted mind allows form users to recapture data they had previously typed in a form in the event that they hit the back button after already submitting the form. It’s another way to get the functionality of session IDs (another search engine headache..lol). If you want to know more about the what the Viewstate variable is and why it is used, check out the Wiki article about it or this article. But the price you pay for this nice little feature can be large, literally. Many Viewstate variables can grow to be HUGE, some of which over 100K. And that has prompted many SEO professionals to become concerned about its potential effect on SEO. But will it really have any affect on your search listings?

There are really two main issues at the heart of potential SEO problems for the Viewstate variable:

1) The size of the variable can prevent the search engines from indexing some or all of the page.

2) The size of the variable pushes content down on the page, which makes it less important in the eyes of the search engine.

Let’s look at each of these issues a little more closely to really understand the concerns.

The first issue really stems from Google’s old “Best Practices” in which they used to recommend that Web masters make Web pages less than 100k because that is all they indexed for any given page. Thanks to technology advances, Google now indexes more than 100k. I have seen up pages of more than 500K indexed in Google and I am sure they do much more than that nowadays. Yahoo also has a the ability to index much more than 100k. So from that perspective, it is unlikely (although still theoretically possible) that you Viewstate variable will prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your content because of a file size issue.

The second issue is a little more problematic to draw a conclusion from. The thing is, although many SEO professionals including Rand Fishkin and Bruce Clay (scroll down half the page and read Bruce’s advice on Tables which has a direct correlation to this issue) subscribe to the theory that keyword prominence is important to SEO rankings, it is not clear if the engine would view the Viewstate variable as being equivalent to text and / or whether or not the search engines would view the prominence of the content any differently if it was preceded by the Viewstate variable. In other words, it may just ignore it, in which case the page content is pretty much equivalent with or without the variable as far as the search engines are concerned. And from a logical point of view, it makes a certain amount of sense. However, when it comes to Google and SEO in general, assumptions based on logic don’t always pay the bills…lol.

My philosophy about SEO has always been to eliminate as many unknown variables in the process as possible. And while I may have convinced a few people based on these observations that the Viewstate variable has no effect on SEO, it is virtually impossible to set up a controlled test to determine the effect absolutely. And so, because the potential for issues exists, my opinion is, don’t leave it to chance. Or in this case, don’t leave it to Google to decide if the Viewstate variable harms your search rankings. There are also some reports of problems with implementing Viewstate variables as it pertains to SEO (**note in this thread, Joe Brinkman of DotNetNuke proposes another possible solution). The other point I would make in justifying a change to the Viewstate variable to make it more SEO friendly (as well as PPC friendly) is that with big sites, this variable can have an affect on your load time and overall site performance. So it bears looking at even if you decide not to change it, to at least optimize the variables it stores.

So now that we have determined that we are concerned about the SEO effect that the Viewstate variable might have based on its default implementation, what can we do about it? We have four options:

1) Get rid of it (in other words, turn the Viewstate variable off).

2) Move the Viewstate to the bottom of the page. Another article about moving the Viewstate.

3) Make it smaller. You can use Viewstate decoder software to understand what variables are being passed and then eliminate the unnecessary ones. This can be very effective as the default setting for Viewstate is often times more than necessary.

4) If you are really technical, Peter Bromberg explains how you can move Viewstate to the server. ** Special disclaimer, I have never tried this personally but based on Peter’s credentials and the content of his article, I believe this would be a good solution.

In the world of SEO where there are over 100 variables (according to Google) that can affect rankings, its always a good idea to eliminate as many potential problems as possible. It’s also a good idea to not only optimize your site for rankings, but for users as well. And that means having as short of load times as possible. And with that in mind, I recommend using one of the four solutions presented here to make sure that the Viewstate variable is causing you problems you can’t see.

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Google Wins Again – ASK is History

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:26:00 +0000

OK so maybe not history, but if you read this article about ASK changing their business model to appeal to married women, it’s pretty clear that they have raised the white flag and given up competing with Google. It’s actually a smart move as they are focusing more on their core user group. But it now makes the MSN / YAHOO deal all that much more interesting. Personally, as much as I love Google, I don’t believe that this news, or a potential MSN/Yahoo deal is good for SEO professionals. What Google needs is more competition and not less. Unfortunately, no other companies are in a position to compete with them at this time. Certainly not Yahoo or MSN. Even if they do merge these two still won’t be able to produce a better product. Their corporate cultures can’t compete. How can putting two sub standard technologies together make one that is better than the leader? It can’t. And it won’t. So as ASK fades into the distance as Altavista once did, it makes Google seem that much more important to anyone looking to drive significant traffic to their Web site via organic search.

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Why the MSN / Yahoo Deal (Mahoo?) is Bad for SEO

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:49:00 +0000

So it appears that Microsoft is hell bent on acquiring Yahoo. This is not a good thing for the SEO industry nor is it good for consumers. SEO is already dominated by three main search engines (sorry ASK but you are not one of em). The three are Google, Yahoo and MSN. And MSN is just barely on the radar. I understand why MSN wants Yahoo. It’s pretty easy to see it would help them compete with Google. But the thing that strikes me as funny is, other than acquiring existing marketing share, how is that acquisition going to help them to take some of what Google already has. The presumption is that somehow the merger of these companies is going to create a stronger company capable of competing with Google. Unfortunately for them and the average visitor, nothing could be further from the truth. See the real reason that Yahoo and MSN can’t compete with Google is that Google’s company infrastructure and culture are superior to other two companies.

You can see it at every level of the equation. Google is an innovative company that is constantly on the forefront of development and constantly trying to improve their products with a big focus on user input and even collaboration. Their computer infrastructure is at the forefront of technology and no one has a more powerful system to execute search. Google is constantly getting awards for “best place to work” and attracts the best new talent. If you ever go to a Google party at SES or some other conference, its always a young, hip, dynamic feel to it. If you look at Yahoo and MSN through the same lens of evaluation, both fall short. It’s company culture and it starts at the top. When you deal with Google, you get the impression that you are dealing with a company that is focused on their users. With MSN, you get the impression that you are dealing with a company that is focused on money. And therein lies the difference and it’s why this deal sucks so bad. I just know that if MSN gets their greedy little hands on Yahoo, they will ruin it. And I will bet you that it won’t take for existing Yahoo users to jump that ship in favor of Google. And that’s just from the user perspective.

From an SEO standpoint, having two major portals instead of three that matter, reduces the opportunity to provide search listings for clients. So granted MSN listings would mean more, but at the same time, the competition to get those listings would be tougher. I’m not saying that Google doesn’t need competition and I certainly don’t think that Google is perfect (see Position 6 error..lol). But, I just don’t see how repositioning market share without an improvement in innovation is going to improve the quality of Yahoo or MSN’s search. If anything, it’s going to make it worse while these two huge organizations try to figure out how to merge with one another. To say nothing of all the jobs in search that would lost as the companies consolidate their resources. I really hope that the this deal doesn’t happen. I don’t think it’s a positive development for the SEO community, or for consumers.

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BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» Microsoft

Will Google Copy Bing with Categories on the Side Bar?

Google Starts Trends

Yahoo and Microsoft Copy Google

Was Clusty First?

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MSN, then Live, now Bing – What do SEOs need to know?

Should I even care about Bing?

I’m an SEO and what do I need to know about Bing?

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MSN Search Engine is out of Touch with Reality

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A Visual Comparison of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft

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Mystery of the Viewstate Variable – Does It Really Affect SEO?

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Google Wins Again – ASK is History

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Why the MSN / Yahoo Deal (Mahoo?) is Bad for SEO

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