Bing/Yahoo For Site Traffic?

Hello good people!

Welcome to Cyber Monday! This has been one of my favorite days of the year since the name was first coined in 2005. What can I say, a whole day dedicated to people buying stuff online gives me a warm tingly feeling!

Just a quick Adsense earnings update: Sunday was a monster day, and I’m guessing it was in anticipation of Cyber Monday. But whatever the reason, it beat out Black Friday across the board on all my websites!

Adsense earnings were $137 for the day and Amazon affiliate commissions were $11.17 off of $159.63 in items ordered. That brings the day’s total earnings to $148.17 which is back to pre-panda levels!

I’m sure this is just a holiday shopping increase that’s temporary in nature, but I’ll definitely keep my eye on it an report back. In fact, today seems pretty slow already, I’m right at $30 in Adsense revenue at noon central time. We’ll see how it goes!

On with today’s Article…

I talk a lot about Google on this blog. I just can’t seem to help myself. They’ve been the all powerful giant of search for years now, and so much of my Adsense site traffic – and therefore revenue – comes from them, that it’s hard not to get carried away obsessing about them.

Believe me, if you’ve ever spent 4 months building a website only to see Google deindex that site for no apparent reason, then you know where I’m coming from!

But the fact is, Google isn’t the only game in town. People often forget that Bing/Yahoo still exist. Not only do they exist, but they’re slowly eating into Google’s search market share.

Bing/Yahoo…

I refer to them as Bing/Yahoo because for all intents and purposes they are the same search engine. If I could get away with calling them Binghoo I would. Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo a few years ago. The bid fell through but they did come up with this goofy agreement that Bing would power the searches at Yahoo.

It’s been a messy partnership to say the least. And I’m not really sure how long it can last. On one end you’ve got Yahoo recently firing their CEO and desperately trying to sell themselves to anyone, on the other end you’ve got Microsoft losing something like 9 billion dollars recently on Bing.

Messy.

Generally I ignore Binghoo because the amount of traffic that they send to my Adsense sites is tiny, usually. Every once in a while I’ll somehow get a site listed well at Binghoo and see some nice traffic for a while, but that’s rare.

One thing they’re really good for is whenever I have a site deindexed from Google. I’m always happy to see a steady trickle of traffic come in from Binghoo. It’s usually enough traffic to generate enough Adsense revenue to cover the webhosting and domain name renewal costs for the site. So I’m happy.

So why am I talking about Binghoo?

Good question. The reason is because I’ve noticed something funny going on at Binghoo lately. I think they’re going through some sort of algorithm change like the Google Panda update. It’s not just me, other people are starting to notice too.

Over at Webmaster World there’s currently a good discussion of these changes. Some people are seeing increases in Binghoo traffic, some people are seeing their sites get nuked completely. Some people are suggesting that Binghoo deindexed any site that referenced Cyber Monday!

It’s hard to get a clear picture. But I wanted to write a little bit about it so that you know something’s up with Binghoo. I’ll keep an eye on it and let you know if I can figure out which way the cookie is crumbling over there. In the mean time…

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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