In the last post I wrote how google advertises on bing by bidding on the cheap keywords. Today I noticed that bing advertises on google too and according to a few older posts that I found, bing has been doing it for a while.

As you can see in the example image above, bing comes up as #1 result when searching for “search engine” on google. I checked the same keywords on bing and google doesn’t come up in the search results. Pretty interesting, seems that bing actually chooses highly targeted keywords that are not really cheap. I assume that being #1 in the search result for “search engine” costs couple bucks per click. It seems that the two competing companies chose different advertising methods to advertise on each other. I wonder if there is a way to measure the results and actually see who is getting a better deal. It is interesting to see if one google user who clicks on highly targeted ad is worth more to bing than forty bing users (assumptions) who click on less/non targeted ads to google? I would think that google got a better deal here, what about you? My assumptions are based on my cpc campaigns and I tend to like 0.05 cent keywords more than $1-$5 ones, I usually get better ROI this way.

Another interesting observation is that bing comes up as #3 result in organic search, as you can see on the same image above. While it is not #1, it probably still gets a quite few new users to bing. I also think that google has some explanations for this, #1 altavista is the oldest, #2 dogpile is older then bing too, etc… However, when searching for “search engine” on bing, google is not even on page 1. It is in position #14 on page 2 for me here. Hmm… That is odd. While bing may have it’s own algorithms that are somewhat confidential, it makes me wonder how searchenginehistory.com for instance comes before google? Obviously pagerank doesn’t have value here as google is 10 and this site is 5. Backlinks are not the main factor here either, google has waaaay more backlinks. Is it domain age? Doesn’t seem so… It shows 2005 for searchenginehistory and 1998 for google here. Traffic rank/bookmarks/sitemap stats are significantly better for google too. While bing is pretty new, it makes sense to see if there is some bigger factor here. To me it looks like google beats searchenginehistory in every way except that it doesn’t have “searchengine” in the url or the title. There is also no content (it must be the king, right?). Does bing pay that much attention to these?

Anyway, its time to make some sort of conclusion on how we can relate this info to our interest.

First, watch the competition and get as much details as possible. When I was writing previous post, I didn’t know that bing is using google for advertisement as well. I thought google was the only smart one. While I had some interesting observations, I did not have enough facts.
Second, always go into the details, think why things are the way they are when it doesn’t make sense. As a result of this observation I learned that domain name, content and title have more effect on the position in bing than I thought it had. I will probably do additional research on the subject and see if I can rank higher in bing for some sites.
Third, when you look at the competitor, think that a competitor may be looking back at you. If you have a valuable service, be protective, be smart, be sneaky… As long as it’s all legal…

At last, you probably have some interesting assumptions as well. Please post your comments, let us know your opinion on the subject.