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Microsoft’s Bing Falsifies Site Data to Increase Click Through Rates
SEM News Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com
Published: Jun 04, 2009 - 01:12 am
Story Found By: UtahSEOpro 983 Days ago
Category: SEM
Microsoft’s brand new search product, Bing, was unveiled to the public over the weekend. Over all the response has been moderately positive. Most of the attention has gone into Bing’s use of technology that Microsoft acquired from Powerset, that provides a series of related search terms for each query. However, it is going to take a lot more than copying what Google already does to bring down the search giant.
 Comments16 Comments  

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from Halfdeck 983 Days ago #
Votes: -2

Big deal.

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from NorthSouthMedia 983 Days ago #
Votes: 0

It looks as though its doing semantic relationship background work, not really falsyfing title tags just being clever in a friendly ’mobster’ sorta way - it’s the Teflon Don of search engines and I feel it’s territory warfare is just beginning.

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from MajesticSEO 983 Days ago #
Votes: 1

It’s 100% anchor text driven - see screen shot of quick analysis of that domain: http://tinyurl.com/r7t8w5

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from Jill 983 Days ago #
Votes: 0

good analysis @MajesticSEOIf it’s anchor text driven, then it should be highly relevant to the searcher.

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from MajesticSEO 983 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Thanks Jill - it does look pretty likely cause to me: the most interesting part (you don’t see it on screenshot but drilling into further report for that anchor text) shows that most of backlinks for that anchor text come from nofollowed backlinks.Now, Google does not rank this site for this query, presumably because they do indeed discount nofollowed backlinks/anchor text, however in case of Bing it seems that Microsoft DID use them! This might expose them to blog spam, unless they only accept nofollowed backlinks from trusted sites.IMO Microsoft did a pretty good job in this case - it might be difficult to see why though without analysing domain backlinks/anchor text.

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from joehall 983 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@jill - In some cases its not relevant at all.Lets take a look at the example that MajesticSEO looked up. If someone runs the query, “Joe Hall” and jozsoft.com comes up with the term “Joe Hall” as the title, that is an extremely pointless result. Because there is absolutely nothing about me on that site. Yes, it is my company, but there is nothing about me as an individual. Thats what my personal blog is for and is why I titled that blog “Joe Hall”.

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from NorthSouthMedia 983 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Why can’t they just show the original Title Tag instead of showing a semantic anchor text driven title tag ... it’s cheeky in a kiddie toungue-in-cheek fashion but I can obviously see why webmasters will take the hump ... overall Bing has shown it means business, this is just another roll-up of their t-shirt sleeve to display how it intends to muscle in on the existing competition.

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from joehall 983 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@NorthSouthMedia - exactly!

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from MajesticSEO 982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

> Thats what my personal blog is for and is why I titled that blog “Joe Hall”It can be argued that your blog page is the most relevant page on your site for that kind of query, however your homepage contains "Joe Hall" in its body, so from algorithmic search engine’s point of view such choice is not entirely unreasonable - in this case the page ranked mainly due to anchor text, so Microsoft tried to be smart and put it into place they usually reserve for titles.@NorthSouthMedia - if they have not used anchor text which they could see at the time of searching as best match for that url, then user won’t click on potentially very relevant site. Doing so is a good thing when it comes to driving visitors to relevant sites in my view.I’d say "falsification" is a bit too strong word for this behavior.

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from NorthSouthMedia 982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@MajesticSEO granted sir you do speak a helluva lot of sense but even you highlighted that the  "user won’t click on potentially very relevant site." So, as Joe pinpointed, to an extreme, it is an agrressive behaviour towards CTR’s and making Bing seem more relevant to the serachers query.I, for one, am not unashamed that they are doing such a thing, but feel that their need to be "relevant" is undermining the webmaster’s own efforts in constructing the sites/page title tag. I’m not going to stand on any soap-box and downcry Bing because I really like it, as a search engine and not as a marketing gimmick of a ’discovery engine’. Microsoft have a pedigree of getting what they want when they turn their full attention to a subject and eventually we are seeing that in Bing’s appearance, through time they will follow-suit to a webmasters wishes and display the title tag in its original cached form ... until then, well, expect Bing to be as competitive as its creators brand name. Why you also felt the need to anchor my username to my profile is also a mystery, perhaps :)

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from MajesticSEO 982 Days ago #
Votes: 1

I view it as the next step that had to be done - Google was showing anchor text in place of titles for a long time now, but they did it mainly (if not exclusively) for urls that have not been crawled yet, and thus had no proper page title.Microsoft is trying to outdo Google, so when they were confronted with this problem they made another step forward - show anchor text in place of page title IF that particular page had most of matches in anchor text and nothing in title part of it. Merits of this decision can be debated (I would not be suprised if they undo it), but saying that this action is falsification is a bit too harsh - that’s my main point: give it some time and a few Bing-bombs and they will probably change this behavior - http://www.bing.com/search?q=miserable+failure - Bing is few years behind Google, so don’t be too harsh on them, they are improving :)

Avatar Moderator
from Jill 982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I dislike any search engine changing my Titles to something else. Which is why I love attributes such as noodp and noydir. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what Joe means by Bing being manipulative, although I think I just had a flash of insight into it. Are you saying that because their results are perhaps less than relevant to the query at hand that this is how they are making them appear to be more relevant? If so, that’s an interesting thought. At any rate, if we’re lucky, they’ll put out a nobing attribute we can add to our robots tag :D

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from NorthSouthMedia 982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I never once said it was falsification, my quote,as above states "not really falsyfing title tags" ok I really should have spelled it ’falsifying’ that’s more Joe’s grump than mine :)

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from MajesticSEO 982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I was referring to "falsification" used in the title of this article - it will probably be shown differently on Bing though if someone bothers to link to it with some other anchor text :)Last thought for the night (it’s 1:35am in UK now!) - this article is useful because it shows that anchor text plays very important role in Bing’s rankings, in fact it creates possibilities for Black-hat SEO tricks that are not pleasant, chances are (if anyone cases to do it for Bing) after a few high profile attacks of this nature they will stop showing anchor text as title.Good night all! :)

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from phaithful 982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I definitely agree with Alex on this one ... "I view it as the next step that had to be done".If you’re a fan of Information Retrieval beyond just SEO, it’s a fairly logical step in attempting to add relevance based on the intent of the query.In the particular case with Joe, it may or may not be so relevant, but it could be argued that since most people use "Joe Hall" as the anchor text, that external votes indicated that "Jozsoft.com" equates to "Joe Hall". So the engine is trying to add relevancy and explcitly indicate to the searcher that Jozsoft.com = "Joe Hall" which they searched for.This of course brings to light the issues of "Link Bombing" ... and as we can see, "Miserable Failure" does work against the engine in this case: http://www.bing.com/search?q=miserable+failure&go=&form=QBREAlthough it doesn’t seem to work for "Cheerful Achievement": http://www.bing.com/search?q=cheerful+achievment&go=&form=QBRE

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from DaveN 979 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I have seen google do the same many times over, normally when you have bad Title Tag, which lets face facts this one is !DaveN

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