affiliate marketing blog  

Bing vs Google isn’t a new lawsuit (yet).  And it really isn’t about the difference in results between the two (although, we’re going to look at that too).  It’s about what happens if Bing gets more market share and how it will affect your sales and conversions as an affiliate marketer.

We’ve had a couple months now to see how Bing is different than Google.  And we’ve been logging it all on the AffSpot servers.  Relentlessly in some cases.  Here’s what we’re finding so far.

At any point in time Google has between 3-6 connections to AffSpot active.  i.e. crawling.  Bing, on the other hand, has 1 or two, and rarely more than that.  In other words, Google is indexing pages faster and more completely than Bing.  And when we do a side-by-side comparison it shows.  Google has EVERY page in AffSpot indexed.  Even if you edit one of your old posts and change a smiley, Google gets the change within an hour.  Bing, not so much.

Check out Bing vs Google for your own sites.  Odds are Google has your site more completely and more currently indexed.  We used the Bing vs Google tool on 50+ sites with nearly identical results.  Google’s database is bigger, their spiders are faster, their results are more complete.  www.affspot.com has 718,000+ entries in the Google results, Bing only shows 26.  And when you look at the results…  Well, if you like having results that contain offensive material that has nothing to do with the subject of your search…  Bing has it.  The 4th result on Bing is, well, auh..  oh just face it.  It’s offensive tripe that has not one thing to do with www.affspot.com.  And similar results have shown on all of our test searches.  It’s not pretty.

One one of our AffSpot members new blogs (no, not mine, and not this blog either) we were able to check conversion rates.  And Bing referrals did convert better as a percentage.  But nowhere near the amount needed to overcome the overwhelming referral numbers from Google.  I took a look at one of my personal sites and discovered the same thing.  Bing referrals converted better.  But not enough to make me want to “tune” my sites for Bing.  There’s no way it could pay off.

But here is something even more interesting.  If I do a site:www.affspot.com Google is showing 8350+ pages, and Bing is showing 6220.  And those numbers havn’t changed much in the past month.  Since AffSpot has about 8600 unique pages the Google numbers not changing isn’t suprising at all.  What is suprising is that Bing just isn’t increasing the number of indexed pages at all.  And we do see in our logging that they are crawling pages they’ve never seen before (i.e. new posts).  That’s just curious.  I mean, why arn’t the new pages being included in the index?

So, what do we conclude from all of this?  We know Bing is growing in market share.  We know Microsoft owns Bing and they’re more than a little competitive.  So the only conclusion we can make is that at some point in the future we’re going to have to find a way to optimize our sites for Bing and NOT mess up our standings in Google.

We also know with the busiest (and most profitable) time of the year upon us messing with an Affiliate site in an attempt to optimize for Bing isn’t a smart idea right now.  This year, it’s best to work on the things that will make a difference now.  Improving the quality of your content, the items that you are marketing for the season, building opportunities to interact with your prospects and customers.  Not optimizing for Bing.  Not yet.

What have you found?  Clock that discussion link and let’s compare notes.