Will My Website Rankings Change With the Introduction of Bing?

On May 28, 2009 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the world to their latest incarnation of its search technology, Bing. All web users were given access to Bing on June 3, 2009. Why did Microsoft alter the search engine and what does this mean to the search engine ranking your business already has achieved? Will your keyword ranking lose ranking?
The first question is quite simple to answer. Microsoft is desperate to get some of the market share that Google now has. Do the names Magellan, Open Text, Info Seek, Snap and Direct Hit sound familiar? These are all Search engines that Google has taken over in the last decade. In 2006 the market share for Google and Live Search were 49.2% and 9.6% respectively. At the time of Bing’s onset the market share of Google had grown to 72.4% and Live Search had fallen to just 6.3%. With the Google slice of the search engine pie so large and not slowing down, Microsoft had to make some improvements to their search engine offering.
The second question is harder to answer. At first glance, the rankings you and your SEO provider have achieved should not be affected. Some features of the new Bing are impressive and could garner an ease of use which could be beneficial to your website visitors. One major difference is the fact that Microsoft calls their latest endeavor a “decision engine” not a “search engine”. The main reason for the title alteration is that Bing is supposed to assist the user in making decisions by delivering the best results, presented in a more organized way to make the key tasks easier and actually help you make decisions faster. There are features such as cash back on great products, and Price Predictor, which will tell the user when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the lowest. Bing will also offer compare and contrast features so your customer will be able to compare your product, price and shipping requirements against others. It could be wonderful for your business to have such features readily available. A primary goal of all websites is for the consumer to make a wise choice|smart decision} (the decision to buy) quickly. Bing promises to do just that.
Something else to keep in mind is that Microsoft plans on spending between $80 million and $100 million marketing Bing. These figures represent almost a quarter of their yearly advertising budget. This large amount of advertising can only assist all of those websites ranked on Bing. High rankings should translate into sales. It is almost like getting free advertising. Your SEO company should work very hard in the next year to increase your rank on Bing so you can take advantage of this advertising push.
Microsoft reports that your website’s rankings may fluctuate a bit at first. They say that the rankings will become stable “in a short while”. Since the searches are going to be more refined and narrowed, it is believed that URL’s with hyphen separated words will have an initial bounce. But the results are too new to analyze. We can only go by what Microsoft says at this time.
Should you consider changing your SEO optimization strategy? It is always a good idea to speak with your professional, but at this time,probably not. Remember how small Bing’s slice of the search engine pie is. A month into its launch, Bing’s share has grown to 8.23% of all searches. While this is not a large, the upward trend can only help those websites rank well on Bing. Microsoft’s Bing has come quite far in a short amount of time. Last year the term that was searched the most|the most commonly searched term} on Live Search was “Google”. After its unveiling, Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder called Bing “astounding.” All the buzz can only improve web traffic and hopefully increase web sales.