bing

Google executives said 99.9% chances to close google.cn

14
Mar
google china

it appears that google is seriously closing down in china. executives there said there is 99.9% chance to pull out.

the search engine scene is going to be deeply changed here :

1) baidu is definitly going to gain market shares.

2) bing is probably going to gain market share too, because when chinese people look for something outside of china, they don't use baidu, they use google, because it's foreigner too.... i guess now they will use bing a bit more. specially because microsoft made it clear they were not leaving china.

3) google.cn close down, but not google.com. everyone can use google.com here in china, the question is : are the authorities going to block it now google made them lose face... that's an open question, and it's very hard to find an awnser.

well, it's no surprise google is closing down as i pointed out here, their quest was hopeless.

SEO for Baidu is definitly going to be more important now.  so read this article about baidu search engine optimization ;o)

Motorola searches with Bing in China

12
Mar
Bing and Motorola in China

For anyone living in China is not a secret that cell phones market is huge. Around every corner it is possible to see people with brand new cell phones, Smartphone advertisements and new models every week. Well, Microsoft noticed this.

Bing in Smartphones

Microsoft made a deal with the cell phone manufacturer Motorola to have Bing as their default Search Engine in their Smartphones. Motorola will "deploy Bing services on Motorola devices powered by Android." They will also have a widget to boost search, which means that most searches done from Motorola phones will be powered by Bing's algorithm.

Motorola says that "Search and Maps capabilities through Microsoft will initially be available in China, starting in Q1 2010, through either pre-load or over-the-air updates for (Andriod based) devices already in market."

Implications for SEO?

It depends on your audience and objectives of you website:

  • Do you want people to find you trough their phones?
  • Is there an interesting opportunity that comes from the mobile market?
  • Do you want to be promoted on a local environment?

If you said yes to the previous questions, think of this:

  • Optimize your local searches in Bing. If people are looking for "Web development company in Beijing" using Bing, what will they find? We know Bing loves keyword rich domains and URLs.
  • Try to for search yourself using Bing Maps! Are you there? If not, look at which are the first results and what are they doing to rank well on Beijing and Shanghai maps?
  • How does you site looks in a Smartphone? Think of getting low page load times, good JavaScript degradation and CSS style adapted for mobile phones.

More and more searches will come from phones in China, especially those for local things, so get ready to <strong>SEO for Bing</strong> and develop good websites for mobile devices!

Testing the alt attribute

29
Sep

A French website (www.laboratoire-referencement.fr) very often tests differents attributes for Google, Bing and Yahoo to compare their effectiveness.

Let's see today their results for the alt attribute (the alt is used in images)

Aim of the test

The target of this test is to analyze if it is possible to rank a page on a specified keyword, only by using the alt attribute of an image. This test will be done through Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Procedure

A keyword (defined as KW) has been put in the alt attribute of an image such as

<img src="" alt="KW" />

KW is a KeyWord which doesn't exist on any webpage known by Google, Bing and Yahoo.

NB: KW is not the true word used, it is kept secret in order to redo the test several times.

When we were looking for the keyword KW in theses 3 engines, the answer before the test was:

"No answer found" or No pages contain KW

If, after having indexed the test page containing the word KW in an alt attribute, a search engine, for the same query, gives as a result the test page, we can then come to the conclusion that:

(1) - The Alt attribute alone allows to rank a webpage with a given key sentence

If not, one can conclude that:

(2) - The Alt attribute alone cannot rank a webpage on a given key sentence

Limits

If we come to the second conclusion, it doesn't mean that the search engines never analyse the content of the alt attribute.

As a matter of fact, it is possible that:

  • A keyword only in the alt attribute is not enough to rank a page on this keyword but brings anyway a bonus.
  • This attribute is used to fight spam, over-optimization or duplicate contents.
  • The test is not genuine for the word KW doen't exist anywhere else on the page.
Result of the test
Test on Google OK
Bing  No
results on Yahoo  No

The test page is not ranked if we make a query with KW on Yahoo nor Bing.

The test page is ranked with the word KW on Google.

 

Interesting, isn't it?

Bing Visual Search : Beautiful and Useless

16
Sep
bing visual search

What is bing visual search? well it's just a "new way" for navigation online, using images instead of words. You can for example chose a theme (travel) that you recognise with the image, and then chose a city, that you try to recognise with the image. Actually, i was looking for beijing, and it's impossible to recognize it. it's not the forbidden city, nor the summer palace, it's some view maybe from chaoyang which was used...

 

Visual Search Goes Faster?

microsoft says the search is faster. trueth is the search is... longer. specially when at the end, if you click on the picture of beijing, all they are doing actually is... typing beijing for you in the search field of bing... is that a joke? no... doesn't it go faster to type "beijing" in the search field... "YES, it does".

 

Silverlight Needed

To use this "new way" for surfing, you need to install silverlight, the microsoft competitor product for flash. is it worth it? NO. I'll keep you posted and will tell you if something new is really interesting, but for this, it's just not interesting, not important, useless thing. but it's beautiful, is that enough?

i'll give you the link anyways, but i warned you click here for bing visual search (but you'd better keep on reading this seo blog ;0)

 

National vs International Domain Name Extension and SEO

7
Sep
rankings of websites with national and international domain name extension

We did a few tests about the differences between national and international domain extensions regarding SEO, and the rankings of these websites in national search engines like google china baidu or bing. (check your rankings in google and baidu here)

What is a Domain name Extension?

  • International domain name extensions like : .Com, .Net , .Org or .Pro
  • National domain name extensions like: .de (Germany), .fr (France), .cn (China)

What was the Test ?

We launched several websites, with the same domain name, but with different domain name extensions (some national domain name extensions and some international). We let the search engines crawle them and index them, and then we test their rankings.

Results
It appears clearly that the national domain extensions has a very strong impact on the rankings of websites in the designated country.

Actually, the National Domain Name Extension is more important than :

  •     The language used on the website
  •     The IP location of the hosting

 

For example, we did the test with the Chinese national domain name extension which is .CN, but the website was hosted in a European country, and the language of the website was English.
Still, the website was ranking better in google.CN (China) than in google.Com (language of the website) or google.DE (the hosting country). Why was it ranking better in google china? Well, the only link between these websites and China was the national domain name extension, and obviously, it’s weight on the rankings was considerable.

Conclusions

National domain name extensions are very very important to your SEO and your Rankings. (but still, you might chose an international domain name extension because of your branding strategy, etc. SEO is something you must consider, but not something that should replace ALL of your former marketing tools)

Our ranking study also showed that the “country” of your backlinks are also very important for your rankings in that country. To make it clear : if you have a website in the USA, but the majority of your backlinks are coming from England, your website is going to rank higher in Google England.
So remember, post the backlinks in the country you target (not only the language you target).

Google is Google, not by Chance:
Google is the smartest. On bing and baidu, we reached directly very high positions because of the domain names we’ve chosen and the domain names extensions, and we shouldn’t have. We had only 2 pages on the websites, a very young age for the domain names, and very few backlinks.  
That’s also no surprise as we have seen in the comparison between google and bing : “weight of keywords in urls on your rankings”
Google seemed to have a more wise approach and more balanced algorithm, which makes the search “safer” and with better quality.  

Optimization on Bing: all you need to know

21
Aug
Optimize your website for Bing

Since the launching of Bing last June, you need to have some information on optimizing your website for Microsoft's search engine.

Meta: Title

  1. Put the most important words at the beginning, because they have more weight in the algorithm (factor of prominence).
  2. Try to limit to 65 characters (and use at least 5 characters).
  3. For deep pages, put  the most strategic words first, then the description words of the category page, and only at the end, the name of the website.
  4. Make sure you don't have two similar titles.
  5. Avoid using any of these special characters: ' " < > { } [ ] ( )

Meta: description

Although they are not used in the ranking algorithm, it can be used by Bing to display the snippet (small description of each result). Here are some tips:

  1. Create specific descriptions for each page (especially do not repeat the same description on multiple pages).
  2. Don't use the same words as in the meta:title. Try to write a "commercial" description to make the visitor click on your website.
  3. Try to use between 25 and 150 characters.
  4. Avoid using any of these special characters: ' " < > { } [ ] ( )

Meta: keywords

Do not expect much from this meta to improve your ranking ... But according to Bing, it is worth having it, then fill it if it can be done automatically by your CMS (and if it does not bother you to show your competitors what the most strategic keywords on your page are ...).

  1. Separate your keywords with comma.
  2. Do not exceed 874 characters in total (don't ask me where that number comes from, it is adviced by Bing!)
  3. Don't repeat more than 4 times the same word

 

 Read also:

Bing and Google comparison on keywords

Bing and Google SEO comparison on Keywords

19
Jun
bing google

Bing gives a lot more weight to keywords in urls than google.

How do I know that

I tested it!Actually, I was comparing bing and google with this simple yet efficient tool, and this is how I got the first impression that bing answers were containing more often the keyword in the website url than on google.

So here’s the test I did

I searched for 50 random (almost) keywords, and I took for each query the first 50  responses of bing and the first 50 responses of google. Which means I checked  :

50(keywords) x 50(responses) x 2 (search engines : google and bing) = 5000 links

Don’t worry, I wrote a script for that ;o)
  
Then I checked if the keyword was (or wasn’t)  in the URL of the websites.

Example : I search for the keyword  “paris”

So I count this :
 keyword in url of the website
 

I don’t count that :

keyword not in url

And here’s what I found :

For Bing :  86,52%  of the first 50 websites contained the keyword in the URL.
For Google : 71,16% of the first 50 websites contained the keyword in the URL.

 

and don't tell me that this was really dependent on the keywords in my list of 50 keywords.Why? Because bing was showing more websites (with the keyword in the url) than google .... 92% of the time.

So, yes, putting the keywords in the url is really important for BOTH. But it seems that it’s a lot more important for the new Microsoft search engine “Bing”.

So if your strategy is focusing on bing for some niche keyword/market, don’t even think of not putting the keywords in your url or domain name.

Well, I think it’s a bad idea to put such a big weight on the keywords in the url, they should focus more on the content. Besides…this is gonna give more weight to hundred of thousands of parked domains… because domain resellers usually buy domains with keywords in them...

If you’re thankful happy I spent the day programming that script, and then sharing this information with you, I wouldn't mind you talk about it, vote for it on digg (check on the right side bar) or link back to here ;o)

Here are the stats for those of you who want all the figures :

keywords nb of sites with the keyword in the url for google nb of sites with the keyword in the url for bing
test 25 34
seo 28 33
funny 34 44
hello 42 45
welcome 25 20
surprise 35 47
love 39 47
there 32 45
boat 40 46
cars 30 38
design 45 44
pay 41 46
remember 37 47
lyrics 42 45
songs 25 32
manchester 46 48
paris 42 49
beijing 40 48
china 39 45
stop 44 47
photos 22 36
hill 44 47
bikes 30 40
pens 28 40
software 33 41
games 32 39
computers 17 35
folk 40 47
how 34 45
when 23 45
miss 40 49
area 36 46
paper 34 49
headset 32 46
iphone 42 41
news 37 43
php 47 48
drupal 43 44
marketing 37 46
english 35 38
write 28 47
script 43 48
manuel 35 48
language 35 45
tutorial 36 36
berlin 45 47
shanghai 33 44
trip 43 46
casino 32 43
finance 32 44
     
     
Average number of sites with the keyword in url (among the first 50) 35,58 43,26
total sites with keywords (of the 2500 checked) 1779 2163
total sites checked 2500 2500
% of sites among the 50 firsts with the keyword in the url 71,16% 86,52%

 

 

 

Google and javascript, new honeymoon

10
Jun
javascript seo

Yes, google can understand some of the javascript links, and will soon be able to understand more. They just said so at the googe I/O gathering.

 

What does it mean?

It means that for years, we seo experts, were telling you “NO, DON’T, Please take out that ugly javascript link that google doesn’t understand”

Now we will tell you “no, don’t, please take out that ugly javascript link that still many search engines don’t understand, even if google understand it now”.

 

 

Baidu doesn’t, yahoo doesn’t, and we don’t know yet about bing (the new Microsoft search engine), but there are big chances that it doesn’t. So, yes, continue not to use javascript links whenever you can, and always prefer the old html link tag <a href=”” title=””> </a>

 

What are the javascript links google can understand?

google can understand these javascript links :

  1. <div onclick="document.location.href='http://gotothispage.com/'">
  2. <div onclick="myfunctionname('gotothispage.html')"><a href="#" onclick="myfunctionname()">that's a cool page dude</a>
  3. <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open ('youcometothispage.html')">please open this page</a>

 

so yes you can use them, but please, avoid them when not necessary...