I’m currently listed on page one (7th place, to be exact) on Google when you search ‘web design nova scotia’. The reason I’m listed there is due to relevancy, and because of some hard work I’ve worked my way up there. My website is fairly cleanly coded, has some relevant information including this blog, and I have some decent quality backlinks from both client sites and other designer websites and blogs. I’ve never used ‘black hat’ seo techniques like link farms, keyword stuffing and other stuff like that - if there’s one important lesson to learn about the internet, it’s that karma will get you in the end. I’m ranked that well because my website is relevant to the search, as far as Google has calculated in their algorithms. Those that are ahead of me have also earned those positions due to factors like domain pedigree and backlinks.

However, it’s not the same story on Bing.com. I’m on page 11 at the moment. Bing has different criteria for ranking websites than Google, and I have no problem with that fact. It’s what the criteria is. I don’t want to come off as just having sour grapes for not having a decent ranking, I’d understand it if there were more relevant results ahead of me, but this is not the case (ahead of me are sites like the government, interior designers, tourism sites, various directories, public health, etc.). Sure, there are other web designers ahead of me that aren’t on Google, perhaps they’ve earned those positions, but there are also tons of irrelevant links. There seems to be two big things that get you ranked on Bing - age of domain name, and the domain name itself.

One one hand, I can see the importance of domain name age - the older it is, the better chance it’s a trusted source and not a fly-by-night spammer. On the other hand, this means 10 year old outdated websites will get ranked higher than newer sites with more relevant content. Google also takes age into consideration, but doesn’t weight it as heavily, giving balance to freshness of content. I’m also wondering if Bing looks at things like my Google Analytics code and takes off a few points for that (just my conspiracy minded thinking probably). It does seem like Bing doesn’t care that much about content, which I think is a wrong approach.

Why do I really care, though? So what if Bing doesn’t like my site. Google owns the search engine market anyway, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Well, this is the other thing that grinds my gears; it seems that Microsoft (the owner of Bing) are employing their own ‘black hat’ techniques to ensure more market share, by automatically switching Internet Explorer default search to Bing in various cases. They claimed it was a ‘bug’ for IE6, but now it’s started to pop up in IE7, and who knows what will happen with IE8. Anytime they feel like in the automatic Windows updates, they can ‘upgrade’ your search engine to Bing, something Google can never do. I know it’s fairly easy to switch back, but for many users, they will always go with the default settings, which will be Bing for any Windows machine probably from now on. The evidence is all the Internet Exporer 6 users still out there (10 to 15% of all browsers) who have never upgraded to even a newer version of IE, even though the browser is almost 8 years old now, never mind trying a better browser than Internet Explorer altogether (like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera). Therefore my prediction would be that most users that get ‘upgraded’ to Bing will probably not switch back to Google, not realizing the difference. It matters not that the search results aren’t as good, and that Microsoft will control those results. That, plus with 2 clicks any kid can disable the content filters and get straight to the porn videos within Bing, something they’ve already been taken to task for.

I dunno, the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth, we’ll have to see what happens with the search market in the next year or two. I’m not fond of the fact that Google enjoys a virtual monopoly either, however they do seem to be the more ethical of the two current choices.