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Updated 10th of December 2014: Mozilla updated Firefox for UK users and changed default search engine to Yahoo.

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I was not expecting to see in the near future that the Bing search engine would become a real competitor to Google search. However, last week a situation came about that completely changed the SEO world. Maybe it is too soon to make a true proclamation, but it is only the beginning of showing us that Google is not the only option in the search world.

Not many people actually took into account Bing when it came to SEO. I’m sure that the majority of webmasters are already aware of the recent change in the search market. On December 1st Mozilla officially released Firefox 34 where they changed the default search engine from Google to Bing.

Here is the quote from the official 34 version:

  • Default search engine changed to Yahoo! For North America. Bing powers Yahoo search engine.
  • Default search engine changed to Yandex for Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia.

For now,this only applies to the U.S. users and some Russian speaking users, but we’ve already seen a significant change in the search market share.

Following is the US search share for December 2 2014

bing

What we see:

  1. Google’s search share in U.S. dropped from 82.14% to 63.46%
  2. Yahoo! search share in U.S. increased from 9.64% to 29.40%.

Yahoo increased its search presence in North America 3 times in just one day. Sounds fantastic!

Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter said “Firefox 34 is still being rolled out so its usage is currently quite low. It will be interesting to see how this develops. At the moment the change is having a negligible impact on overall search share in the US, but if this early usage trend on Firefox 34 continues then Yahoo could be on course to gain a number of percentage points.”

I’m sure that a lot of webmasters think that, in the next few weeks, those people who must use Yahoo will now switch back to Google. But I’m not sure that many of the new Yahoo users even think about the difference in search results. The person just types a search query into the search bar and receive a list of search results.

Is Bing traffic valuable?

The only way to check this is to review your site statistics. Personally, I can say that Bing traffic is the same quality as Google traffic. At the same time, my friend Matthew Woodward showed his statistics based on how many of his visitors from Bing subscribed to the email list.

 

Source Bounce Rate Pages/Sessions Avg. Session Duration Subscribe to Email List Affiliate Click
Google 5.13% 3.67 00:03:13 1.64% 7.79%
Bing 4.05% 3.79 00:04:05 2.79% 10.70%

 

As you may see, Bing traffic was even more valuable than traffic from Google.

What we know?

Google and Mozilla did not reach any agreement and theyprobably have a current deal saying that Google is the default search engine in Europe. However, since some moves were made in the U.S. and Russia, it means that very soon Google could possibly be replaced in Europe, too.

The difference in search results:

I did not monitor different search queries in Google and Bing to see what is the difference, but I took my name query “Evgeniy Garkaviy” and typed it into Google and Bing search bar and following are the results.

1. In Google, the first search result is temi.co.uk. Then

  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Travel Friendz
  • Matthew Woodward

google_garkaviy

2. In Bing the first search result is Twitter. Then

  • temi.co.uk
  • Again temi.co.uk
  • Matthew Woodward
  • Again Matthew Woodward

bing_garkaviy

Conclusion:

Personally, I do not know exactly how to do SEO properly for Bing now because, during the past few years, I was focused only on Google. Yes, I received good traffic from Bing, too, but did not do anything special for that search engine.

Also, it is very interestingfor me to know if Google will be changed as the default search engine for Europe visitors. I do not mean Russian speaking users because I’m sure that in the United Kingdom, Google’s search share could even drop more than in the U.S.

I will be monitoring this situation and if Bing continues to grow, I will definitely make some changes to improve my sites visibility in Microsoft’s search engine. For now, I can only say that my previous post on temi.co.uk about Bing.com was published very long ago.