Bing Pays Digg to Let Users Try Its Search Engine

I find it interesting to find that Bing has been aggressive in inviting people to use its search engine. Or at least give it a try. One particular observation I saw was in Digg where it aims to help Diggers looking for restaurants find what they’re looking for.

When you click the sponsored entry, you’ll find yourself looking at the search result for the keyword “restaurants”. However, the search result does not provide me with the restaurants I am looking for. Anybody using a search engine would simply not use the very generic search phrase to accomplish my desire to find the right restaurant. I guess the one who benefits the Bing promotion over at Digg is restaurant.com which appears on top of the search result.

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Hong Kong Government Sites Canonicalization Issue

Canonicalization is a relatively new term introduced in the realm of search engine marketing as a way to describe how website URLs are formed. It is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, if your website’s homepage is www.abc.com, it may also come in other forms such as www.abc.com/index.html or abc.com (without the www prefix). Search engines (particularly Google) try to pick the url that seems like the best represents the set of URLs.

But even before search engines get the opportunity to figure it out, are we sure we make our homepage accessible through these variation of URL formats? Let’s take a look at the following Hong Kong government websites. While this does not apply to all, there are websites that don’t display the homepage using the non-www format.

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Bing Go: Bing Improves Its Search Engine Market Share

Microsoft search engine Bing has grown in popularity and this translated to increased volume of search queries and search engine market share as of August 2009. Bing increased its market share by 22.1 per cent month-over-month in August, making it the fastest growing search provider among the top 10.

When I had my seminar a few weeks ago, someone asked what will be Bing’s impact on search engine landscape. My reply was that unlike Bing’s predecessors MSN Search and Live Search, Bing’s search results are more accurate and provide more options to users. It means Bing is a legitimate alternative to the dominant Google search.

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Search Engine Ranking Factors From SEOMOZ

SEOMoz, an authority search engine marketing portal, has released findings of a study among search engine marketing professionals on top factors that influence search engine rankings.

Let’s identify some of these top factors (in order of importance).

Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
This refers to the type of keywords used as hyperlinks from external sites that link to our pages. So if our page is about a blog on HSBC’s junk mail via special offers, a link from another website that uses similar terms such as “HSBC promotional offers” or “HSBC junk mail” helps my blog entry rank better on keyword search using related search phrases.

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Baidu Closing Search Engine Advertising Bid Ranking System

According to ChinaTechNews notes that Baidu is now gradually phasing out its search engine advertising bid system that has been in operation for the past eight years. The news source reports that a professional version called “Phoenix Nest” will replace the current version.

Paid ads often mix with organic search results and only distinguished by a small sign on the right: 推广.

There has been confusion between general search results and paid search results and Baidu executives are aware of it. Search results for certain phrases are littered with a combination of natural and paid search results. Phoenix Nest intends to address the problem and hopes to eventually help advertisers implement better promotion of products and services in Baidu’s advertising platform.

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