Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz has just posted an interesting article about how Google appear to be showing increasingly spammy entries in the SERPs.

While I agree with Rand’s conclusions, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the results with Bing so see if things are as just as bad?

Rand suggested that the following search terms provide spammy results when searching in Google:

So I decided to run the same queries through both Google and Bing, then compare the results.

What I found interesting is that when there isn’t much of an intersection in the results, it’s usually due to Bing listing more local (and less spammy) results than Google.  

Take for instance the “Birthday Party Supplies” query.   Most results returned by Bing were to local suppliers.

The following Venn diagrams illustrate the overlap in the results.   Google results are shown as yellow and Bing results are shown as orange.

SEO Software

Starcraft 2 Strategies

Birthday Party Supplies

Currency Trading Online

Tennis Racquet Review

s

Leather Crafting Supplies

Nanny Services

Home Business Ideas

French Doors

Vietnam Tours

Antioxidant Supplements

Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Whilst working on a new SEO tool which will use the Bing API, I found an interesting statement in the Terms Of Use:

You will not, and will not permit your users or other third parties to:

directly or indirectly generate impressions or clicks on Bing results, or authorize or encourage others to do so, though any automated, deceptive, fraudulent, or other invalid means.

Does this mean that Bing use CTR and Impressions as a ranking factor? 

This has been dismissed before as a ranking factor for Google before due to the possibility of falsifying results by paying for clicks.   Has Bing found a way around this – or are they hoping that this ranking factor won’t be abused?

Bing API Terms Of Use

Since Bing and Yahoo announced their intentions to work together there has been speculation on whether Bing would discontinue support for Site Explorer.

Site Explorer gives users an insight into the backlinks on any domain and is an important tool in the SEO workplace.

Sasi Pathasarathy, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Bing search engine announced at SMX that Bing would continue support for Site Explorer if users want it.

Lets hope enough people can persuade MS to continue support for this useful tool.

If you’re working in the area of Search Engine Optimization in Canada, Hitwise has recently released a report on how search statistics for Canadian users.

The key findings in the report are:

1) Search Engines account for more than one third of all upstream visits in Canada

2) Google holds an 80% share of Internet searches in Canada

3) Most popular searches are for Social Networks, Retailers and Games

4) 51% of Canadian searches contain only one or two words

5) 30% of Canadian searches were not successful

I find point 5 of particular interest to SEO in Canada.  The report explains how the success rate is much higher on searches that include the word “Canada” in the searches.  

To me this tells me that many Canadian sites aren’t using SEO techniques to target geolocational searches?

Interestingly, Canadian searches were more successful on Bing.

You can apply for the free report here:

http://www.hitwise.com/ca/registration-pages/canada-search-report