The war between Google and Bing has long been fought on bloody cyber-battles between the two search giants. Back in 2009, a comparative study between the two showed one very large difference between the two results. When on search pages, sponsored links to the right attracted attention, but the difference between the two was significant:

• 42 per cent viewed these on Bing
• 25 per cent viewed on Google
• 90 per cent of those monitored preferred to view the paid links over organic search results in both engines

The test was redone again in 2011 to give a fairer comparison of the two. Back when the original study was done, Bing was relatively new in the market and people participating in the study were not used to its features or interface. The most surprising aspect of the new study is how close the new results’ margins are. The battle it seems has come to a near-deadlock.

Paid versus organic search: who comes out on top? 

• 90% the study’s participants viewed the organic results at the top. All of the participants viewed the organic results. 

When it came to paid ads or sponsored links on the right, the results are very surprising:

• 28% viewed them on Google;
• 21% viewed them on Bing.

Participants/searchers now overlook the paid links

The question of paid versus organic is a long and oft-debated question in search engine marketing. The research conclusions of this study seem to answer the question in a definitive way. Organic is the winner. Most people would advise a combination of concerted paid and organic search engine marketing in order to achieve broadly successful results for your business, but it seems as though this thinking isn’t necessarily correct; nor is it something we should live and die by when using search engines to market a business or brand.

The differences between the two search giants

Well, really, there aren’t many differences. Certainly no huge differences. There’s a differential of roughly 0.2 seconds between those looking at the organic results on Google (0.9 seconds) and those looking at the organic results on Bing (0.7s). That doesn’t necessarily equal a conclusive win for Google. Far from it.

Matt Cutts of Google has made his feelings on Bing quite clear. He’s gone at them for lots of different things, namely the fact that it appears as though Bing copies its search results from Google entirely. Harry Shum of Bing would deny these vehemently, of course, as he has in this forty minute video on the Bing search engine. And there’s no denying the remarkable similarities in Bing versus Google search results. Typing gobbledygook into one gives you the exact same results in another. But in the end, it seems that those squabbles and politics don’t matter to the users. Users are using both relatively equally and the arguments are rendered moot. The battle between Google and Bing is at a standstill and organic search is rising up in its significance.

Paul

Cloaking is a growing problem for search engines. ‘Cloaking’ essentially cloaks a page of secondary content and presents a crawler or search engine spider like Googlebot with an entirely different page of content. It started out in the early days of the internet when black hat SEO’s would create two unique pages in order to mask more suspect content on one of the pages. This would fool the crawlers into thinking that there was a standard page while web users see another altogether.

Back in the early days of the internet, when Babelfish was the translator du jour and people built .gif heavy websites with obscene backgrounds on Angelfire, this cloaking method was used to disguise porn and other assorted dodgy content from the search engine spiders. To paraphrase Matt Cutts, ‘Google-Bot would see Disney characters and the user would see porn.’ All very underhanded really and Google sees this as a violation of its quality guidelines. No matter what.

Google’s Matt Cutts’ video on cloaking and Google.

This is a great video straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. Cutts gives a clear explanation of the devious nature of cloaking. His videos are becoming enormously popular for web developers and search engine marketers. He’s helping to dispel a lot of the myths and hearsay of search engine marketing and the great thing is that he heads the Google web spam team. Really, there aren’t many sources with that level of credibility or access to information on exactly what Google looks for.

What to look out for:

In Google’s Webmaster Tools the ‘Fetch as Google Bot’ function is a good way of looking at your web pages as Googlebot would. Doing this gives you a clear picture of what the Bot would see and gives you the chance to measure whether your pages are safe within Google’s quality guidelines. If they aren’t, the pages need to be re-addressed or Google will treat these as problem pages. The web spam teams will then intervene to tackle the pages as a priority. This could potentially be harmful for your website and its SEO.

Multi-language 

There are options if you need to display different content for different languages or countries. One way to do this is to use geo-location. Geo-location allows you to identify users from other countries and alter the content to match the language spoken in the country based on their needs.

Search engine marketing can be a difficult game to play at times because there are so many dodgy measures out there. The industry is dominated by people employing underhanded measures in order to achieve search goals and cloaking is a real issue. If your web developer – or you – are using cloaking to mask content from the search engine spiders, it could seriously jeopardise your current standing in the search engine rankings. Google is getting better at identifying these and they are working hard to put a resolute and final end to these practices.

Don’t be like the Klingons. Cloaking is cowardly.

Paul

Ecommerce  sites are constantly struggling with this question and it is a good debate to have. When you sell consumer goods, fast-moving or otherwise, you’ll find that your items come in and out of stock very quickly. You’ll also find that there are often times when items will have to be set to ‘do not sell’ due to manufacturing issues somewhere down the chain. This can be especially true of products with a high stock turnover, which can be fraught with issues up and down the supply chain.

Managers of an ecommerce website struggle with the issue of whether to un-publish a product from the website. All it takes is a balancing of both sides and it’s relatively easy to decide which avenue is best for your business in the long run.

Going-going-gone

When stock items are gone and you’re awaiting new stock for the site, it can often be the easiest thing to just remove it from the website altogether; doing this has pros and cons. Taking your product off the site could affect your search rankings for that product for some time because the older version of that page will still show in the search results as the search engines can take a little bit of time to clean out these 404 pages or ‘not found’ pages. Customers might well be driven through to error pages for a little while, which could result in an increase in customer care or customer service enquiries asking where the items have gone.

The problem with un-publishing products in this way is that there is no clear message being pushed out to the customer; this could irritate consumers coming to the site, if they can’t find what they want to purchase. Without being informed directly, consumer confidence can be affected and the consumer will likely be driven elsewhere to purchase the desired item.

Out of stock, still in sight

Another way to approach the problem is to create a graphic that is added to product pages when an item is out of stock. This is a simple way to alert customers to stock control issues without removing the page altogether. Most ecommerce platforms have an option within the product data to set the product to out of stock when stock runs down, which can either be hard-coded or done with the stock measurement function within the platform.

Although customers will likely be disappointed that they can’t purchase the item, it lets them know clearly that there is an issue with stock and that this should be resolved quickly. A clear message like this is much more likely to encourage them to check back regularly to get what they want. This out of stock message could also be tailored with an intelligent cross-sell and information – if you have it – on when the item will be back in stock.

An out-of-stock message on a product page is a much better option because it keeps the page ‘live’. Although customers might be unhappy in the short-term that they can’t purchase the item in question, they are much more forgiving when they are receiving a clearly communicated message over a page that’s missing completely from the site…and of course it’s great for SEO to keep the page ‘live’ because if you do take the page offline it could take some time for the search engines to re-list that page in their search results.

Paul

Of all the questions I get, this has to be one of the most common. The answer is a fairly straightforward no. Saying no to this question tends to immediately be followed with a “Really?!” or a “Why not?!”. Plainly and simply, SEO is not spam. The reason it has this sullied and festering reputation is down to the constant battle between those offering knowledgeable and valid search engine marketing service and those “selling snake oil” as Google’s Matt Cutts says.

An SEO expert’s job isn’t a cut and dry case of doing the work and leaving; it’s a matter of regularly working with your client to adapt to their organically changing needs. Search engine marketing – and this is true in London and all around the world – is a toe-to-toe game of wits between the black hats and the white hats, that clichéd trope of Hollywood westerns.

When I describe someone as a white hat, I mean that they are legitimate search engine marketers. When they offer an SEO service, they deliver. They are people with years of experience that want to help companies to market themselves more successfully on the Internet. White hats are the good guys and they are offering a real service with real results. But wherever there are real SEO experts, there are the scammers and the spammers and those are the black hats.

The black hats have no real understanding of search engine marketing and how to market a company successfully. They peddle false hopes and lies, opting to fool companies into thinking that they are getting a comprehensive service. In reality, they’re getting a lot of hot air and carbon dioxide. They have companies spending hours on end needlessly cramming the meta-keywords on the promise that it will boost the company’s ranking; they encourage the business to create hidden text boxes on the website that are crammed with repetitive keywords. All of these sly and underhanded methods are what has created this bad reputation for real search engine optimisers.

So many businesses and brands out there are being duped by these people that the real experts are being treated as shady underworld kings sat on mountains of ill-gotten cash. The reality is much different. There are certainly a fair number of snake oil salesmen out there. But these people are not SEO experts; they’re selling spam. These people sell false hopes to businesses and they manipulate them into thinking that they’re getting an expert solution to their search engine ranking requirements.

Search engine marketers help search engines to find pages naturally. They do this using organic keywords, semantics and their experience in SEM. Finding a true SEO expert can be a challenge, but the end results can pay huge dividends. I have years of experience in helping businesses to strengthen their rankings in the search engines, both inside London and beyond.  To get an honest consultation on how I can help your business, you can contact me here.

Paul