Commentary

Bing Adds Sitelinks On A Crowded Page

Bing-Ad

Search engine results pages are becoming a bit crowded. Some of the features just seem to obscure the important information, such as a company's location, phone number, and links to specific Web pages. Bing officially rolled out Sitelink Extensions this week to take searchers from the engine to specific pages on a company's Web site. Marketers can enter up to 10 for each campaign and apply the links to all ad groups. Step-by-step instructions on Bing Ads explain how to create, associate, edit and delete the links.

It's not clear whether Sitelinks -- available to marketers through the Add an Extension and Sitelink Extension in the menu -- will become one of the many Bing features drawing more searches on the site, or whether they will get lost in the Twitter-Klout-Facebook mashup. Marketers need to choose the campaign to add links. The extensions apply to all ads in the campaign. Enter the links in the order they should appear in search results. Link titles should reflect the content tied to the URL of the landing page.

The Sitelinks go through the same editorial review as ads. Then clicking the save button takes marketers to a list of the status information for ads. If you haven't been on Bing lately, those who use search query results as a directory for telephone numbers will find improvements.

comScore search query September stats do not reflect query result improvements. Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in September with 66.7% market share and 0.3 percentage points, followed by Microsoft with 15.9%, flat; and Yahoo with 12.2%, which declined by 0.6% sequentially, according to comScore.

One thing is certain -- search results continue to become more complicated. Between the thumbs-up icon, Bing rewards symbol, and "experts and enthusiasts" list of whom I know nothing about, I'm beginning to wonder how long it will be before consumers will need instruction on how to use a search engine. Recommendations from strangers often remind me of someone going to Craigslist to purchase a used car from a person they don't know -- sight unseen.

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