Is Bing becoming a major player in Search?

[MarkSveik]

Hi all,

Found this article on Mashable:

"Microsoft Bing Controls 30% of Search Market, Google Slowly Shrinking" (sorry, can't post links yet)

The point of the article is this "Microsoft has secured 30% of the search market, largely at Google’s expense, according to data from Experian Hitwise."

Since Yahoo is powered by Bing, when you combine both of their market share you get 30%

"Google, on the other hand, now controls 64.42% of the U.S. search market, a decrease of 3% from its 66.69% share in February. What’s worse, Google’s market share is down 10% from August 2010, when it owned 71.59% of the search market. August was the first month Yahoo Search was powered by Bing, and since then both search engines have grown. This is especially true for Bing.com, which only had 9.87% of the market in August."

Are you guys and gals optimizing your websites for Bing at all? Is there any special we have to do? From what I heard here, Bing doesn't care about follow/no-follow stuff and just counts links. Does that mean that we should be building more links irregardless of follow status?

What are you thoughts on this?

Thanks,

[honed]

Here's the link.

Interesting. We'll see. MS has the cash to compete, but it'll be interesting to see this play out. I don't know if I subscribe to the year end scenario, but it would shake things up if that were to happen.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

They are probably right... but I've been tracking the Bing/Yahoo merger on my sites since it began and the momentum is quite small for the amount of Money Microsoft has thrown at it.

I just checked one of my average traffic niche sites in my network to see how it compares to this statement and here are the results direct from Google Analytics for comparison.

google (organic) 6,205 63.96%
yahoo (organic) 1,297 13.37%
bing (organic 1,090 11.23%
(direct) ((none)) 353 3.64%
ask (organic) 182 1.88%

Here is another one... what is interesting about this one is I do not directly Target USA on this site.

google (organic) 3,026 52.18%
yahoo (organic) 972 16.76%
bing (organic) 833 14.36%
(direct) ((none)) 375 6.47%

I welcome anyone who can break off a piece of the Google Traffic Pie... a more diverse search market benefits everyone in my opinion... well except for Google and people who obsess over Google SEO as their only marketing strategy.

I love Bing searches because for me they tend to convert better.

[shulink]

They are still way behind Google although they are 3rd in the search market.