On December 15, 2010 Bing had announced major updates to Bing search, centered around richer Facebook integration and visually organized experience.Prior to this, the ranking of your website on SERP in Bing was not significantly impacted by your presence on social media sites – Facebook likes, tweets, posts on Facebook Pages.

Bing has enhanced the Facebook effect with its announcement on 16 May 2011. When you search a keyword, Bing finds out what your Facebook friends are interested in, finds stories they have liked by clicking “Like” buttons on web pages, and then shows those pages in the top results – even if those links would not have appeared in SERP.

Bing took a swipe at Google by commenting “Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people” in its announcement Bing is bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the “Friend Effect” to search .

There are three components of the new, social powered Bing experience:

• Friends you trust
• Collective Intelligence
• Facilitating Conversations

With this new tweak, it is not only votes by your Facebook friends, but the collective wisdom of online crowds that will influence search results. Bing now shows well-liked content, including trending topics, articles and Facebook fan pages, from sites across the web, to help you dig in and quickly find exactly what you’re looking for. Bing will show what major brands and companies are saying in recent Facebook posts

With Enabling Conversations, Bing helps people to quickly identify those people in their network who may be able to help them in making a decision or providing advice.

Bing will help in your buying decisions:

Bing Travel Wish List: You can compare trips with Facebook friends, get their advice, suggest new travel destinations, and learn more about a city on Bing Travel.

Friends Who Live Here: Bing will show you which of your Facebook friends live or have lived in the city you intend to visit, so that you can go to them for travel tips.

Flight Deals: Bing will send to your Facebook feed great deals on flights, for cities you’ve liked on Bing Travel.
Shared Shopping Lists: You can build a shopping list and share, compare and discuss it with your friends on Facebook.

You’d better not lose an opportunity – go ahead and add the XFBML version of Facebook Like button to your website and plugins for ‘Facebook like’ button on company blog

On 23 March, Yahoo announced launch of Search Direct. As you begin to type search term in search box, completed search terms will appear in a drop down box, and you will see  the most relevant or top search results in the expanded search box. Yahoo calls it ‘rich answers’.  This is obviously a direct hit against Google Instant.

Yahoo claims it is fast, and the rich content is stored in its own servers, not MS Bing database, though after Search Alliance was rolled out with yahoo results coming from Bing, the search index is drawn from Bing.

Search Direct  is still in beta and covers USA, and content  coverage includes top trending searches, movies, TV, sports teams and players, weather, local, travel, stocks, and shopping categories. You need to go to http://search.yahoo.com/ to experience Search Direct.

So which is better?  To test it out, we typed ‘fuku’ in Search Direct  on 24 March 2011 at 7:45 PM IST.

When you position cursor at search box, immediately, top searches are shown. It was baffling to find ‘2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami -…’  as top news search results.

When ‘fuku’ was typed out, the screen below shows Yahoo’s ‘direct answers’. The top news was dated 23 March 4:40 AM.

Next we tried it on Google. You can see the instant results in this screen, on selecting option ‘fukushima’

Interestingly, Google news results, lower down in page, show real time results. This news item had timeline 24 minutes ago.

Pictured: The robots called in to help prevent nuclear meltdown at Fukushima plant
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:26 PM on 24th March 2011

In yahoo, when you hit back button, you get the initial screen, and you have to start search all over again

Take note that you need to go to http://search.yahoo.com/. When you type ‘fuku’ in http://yahoo.com/  ‘fukushima’ is seventh option, and you do not see direct or instant answers in the page.

For fun, google did show instant results  with ananya seo company website and other links even as we finished typing  ‘anaya seo’, but yahoo direct did not!!

Yahoo says ‘Search Direct predicts search results as fast as a person types, character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience that goes beyond a list of blue links’. This is clearly aimed at Google Instant.  But the claim is not borne out by our experience.  Search Direct does show more number of search options as you type, and if you point your mouse cursor at an option, the instant results are updated in the expanded search box.

But in Google too, if you press the down arrow key on to an option, the instant results are updated. What is more, the instant results cover the entire page, not a smaller expanded search doox, as in Yahoo.

In the press event, Yahoo suggested it owned patents on Instant Search. It said Search Direct is the next generation of search.

Our analysis shows that Yahoo’s claims as hyping the product, which is closer to a vapor ware now.

Bing made a splash with integration of search results with Facebook ‘liked by’ friends links. Bing holds currently only 12% to 15% of search market, so as a business you might dismiss social networking only for nerds and restless young.

All along Google too had its stake in social search with a social circle link below search results since 2009. Now Google has made the social graph more important to organic search with its announcement on February 17, 2011 that links liked by your friends will be bumped up the search results. Your online circle is built by Google from the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed, Gmail contacts (this will include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups).

Social search results will now be blended with other organic results based on their relevance.

Annotation below the result will specify the friend or connection who either shared the link and mode of sharing, like tweet or created content in a blog or publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website or posted a video on YouTube or a photo on Picasa.  Annotation will be  visible only to you, and only when you’re signed into Google account.  There is a new option to that  enables you to choose whether or not to show your connected accounts publicly on your Google profile.

Google images went social last year. When you search on Images, you will  seeing pictures from people in your social circle, which have been  published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr.

Google has a deal with Twitter for full access. It has access to Flickr and Quora content as well. What takes away the fizz is that your social data in Facebook is not integrated. After all Facebook is the most important social networking platform. Maybe some in near future, Google and Facebook may cozy up.

Clearly, as a business owner, you cannot be unsocial. If you have not done so, dress up and start making your presence felt in all social media platforms. Add buttons on your website to share on Twitter and other platforms. Make it easy for people to share your content from website and company blog.

There have two developments in Google search which have bearing for SEO in 2011 :  first is improved spam detection and the second is PageRank changes.

Battling Content Spam

On 21 January 2011, Google announced a redesigned document-level classifier to detect web spam. This will detect pages with scraped content using bots or software, or manual spam content, such as repeated keywords words which occur in junk, automated, self-promoting blog comments, or sites created for link exchange. This will affect primarily sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

Google also claims to target “content farms,” which generate content for SEO based on keywords. These employ low-paid content creators, who scrape content from high ranking sites. However, certain sites generate high revenues from Adsense for Google, and experts doubt if Google will black list sites like eHow, LiveStrong.com.  AOL, with Seed.com and Yahoo, with its Associated Content , are also in the content farm business.

Content scraping, and pingback spam are some of the biggest threats a genuine site faces in 2011. There are tools for pingback spamming and content scraping. Solutions are: check pingbacks before approving them; you can report any scraped content to Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Auto blog pingback spam is now so bad that many blogs are refusing to accept any pingbacks at all.  This is due to many unethical sites that create blogs using packages of WordPress plugins that copy content from other blogs or article publishing sites, and send pingbacks to many blogs to try to get backlinks and traffic.

On December 15, 2010 Bing announced major updates to Bing search, centered around richer Facebook integration and visually organized experience. For a business, the feature of most interest is how your company’s Facebook presence influences organic search engine ranking.

When the partnership with Facebook  was launched in October 2010, your ranking in organic search results was not impacted. The only new feature was that  if you search for a keyword  and one of your friends on Facebook has liked one of the articles that shows up in the search results, you will see their picture next to that result.

Now Bing has tweaked its algorithm. When you search a keyword, Bing finds out  what your Facebook  friends are interested in, finds stories they have liked via little “Like” buttons all over the net, and then inserts that into the top results — even if that link would not have appeared in SERP. This feature is currently only available in the US.

Bing now has 11.8 percent of the U.S. search market, a 48% hump growth since Bing replaced Live search in the summer of 2009. Businesses can no longer look at facebook as a fad for youngsters and Bing as a fringe player. You can boost your internet marketing efforts with an compelling facebook page for your business and integrate it with your SEO efforts.

You can create a Facebook page for a company, or for a specific brand or product offered by the business. You need to make the page interesting for your potential customers, to motivate them to “like” your page and share it with friends. If you achieve that, you now an audience whose permission you have to send them relevant messages about your product. You can engage with them and find out what they love and hate about their product use experience.

Interruption marketing – print ads, TV ads, direct mailers, spam emails – no longer work, however outrageous or interesting the advertisement may be. Permission marketing is about engaging the consumer in your marketing campaign by seeking permission to send your communication or get her attention. Today, the busy, harried consumer is no longer listening to ads. She sticks to familiar products, the market leaders. If she has a problem to solve, she listens to her peers and friends. That is why a new product must first reach the innovators, those who love to try new products, and talk about it to their friends. If your product category space is already dominated by earlier entrants, you need to create a ‘Purple Cow’, a remarkable product, and let it loose on the social media sites.

Seven Steps to Market your Product on Facebook