Recent algorithm shift articles in the news are filled with SEO buzzwords like ‘Panda/Farmer’, ‘Scraper Sites’, ‘Content Farms’ and ‘Link Farm’, and it’s easy to get caught up in these algorithm changes and lose track of the big picture.  How is Bing affected by the recent Google updates?  Is your website traffic fluctuation caused by something on your website, your back links, or the search engines?  To get a better perspective on your traffic and rankings, let’s figure out what exactly happened in the search engines and how each algorithm shift has changed search engines’ means of ranking websites.

Bing “Aether” Algorithm Changes and Bing Search Signal (Oct 2010)
In January 2011, after Google accused Bing of copying its search results, Bing acknowledged the similarity and attributed it to a combination of two different aspects of its algorithm.  Back in October 2010, Bing rolled out an experimental algorithm shift called “Aether” which caused a significant change in rankings.  Bing also admits that for a long time (they don’t say how long) they have been tracking and recording clickstream data.  What this means regarding algorithm changes is that Bing records the surf history of people using the Bing Toolbar or Internet Explorer with the ‘Suggested Sites’ feature switched on.  If someone uses either software configured with default settings, Bing tracks everywhere they go online and uses that data to influence search results – not just for that particular user but for all users.  Since Google has a significant market share of visitors, those who use the Internet Explorer browser or Bing Toolbar (with default settings) are simply feeding Bing search results with the popular traffic from Google.  As a result of the algorithm shift, sites with a high click-through rate on Google end up ranking higher in Bing.  To what degree higher is a question downplayed by Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President of Bing development.  However, if you look at your Bing rankings, you may notice a big shift in Bing results following the Google algorithm changes outlined in the rest of this article.