Earlier this year I made my 2010 predictions for search engines mainly Bing & Google challenging the conversions through search. Since then a lot has come to pass, the new Google layout was implemented and was shortly followed by the controversial “Mayday update” and finally Caffeine going live across all Google data centres.

The new Google layout gave rise to concerns of traffic decreases to websites both in through organic and paid results. Whether or not this was the result of the new layout or simply the adjustments Google made in how they crawl and rank websites and pages that occurred during the same period, was uncertain. Simply put, Google’s “copy” of the Bing layout is not working. As we all know in the internet marketing world, copy and paste solutions do not work and Bing is definitely doing something right in search to drive such large scale changes by Google in an effort to keep up in the search race.

A study by Explido Webmarketing, clearly shows the affect of the new Google layout, and from the above heatmap(before and after) especially within sponsored results, positions 4-10 in paid clearly show a decline in clicks. Unfortunate side effect or intentional move on Google’s part to increase revenue from AdWords with advertisers increasing bidding to compete for top ad positions?

In February Nielsen reported Bing’s US market share reaching 12.5%, a record for the search engine compared to previous years, while Google still dominates the overall market share. Bing still has a long way to go to in terms of market share, however with the engine beginning to power Yahoo results as well, it seems Google may still have to keep a close eye on Bing.

The question is one again, are you optimising for Bing and taking advantage of their increased market share and higher conversions?

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