If you were searching for holiday shopping deals this Monday, I hope you weren't using Bing. As it turns out, Microsoft's search engine removed many sites specifically focused on publicizing Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals from its results. Did Bing become a Grinch, or is something more sinister going on?
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land provides a comprehensive report of what appears to be going on. It's well worth reading if you enjoy drinking your egg nog flavored with a dose of real-life irony. I kept shaking my head, wondering what the folks at Microsoft were thinking.
Take, for instance, the website CyberMonday.com. This site was removed from Bing's index, supposedly due to thin content. But here's the thing: the site is run by the National Retail Federation's digital division. Microsoft is one of this division's member companies – and the division, named Shop.org, is the one that coined the term Cyber Monday about six years ago. I don't know about you, but to me, that's enough to raise a “something's not right” flag.
Google, on the other hand, seems to like CyberMonday.com. The site appears high among its top ten results for a search on the phrase “cyber monday.” That's particularly interesting since Google has gone on record with its Panda updates as fighting a battle against websites that offer thin content.
Sullivan notes that CyberMonday.com isn't the only holiday sales website Bing excluded from its index. He notes that Bing also removed a whole assortment of websites consolidating Black Friday deals from its index as well. However, somewhat suspiciously, a link to Microsoft's own Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals page appears at the top of Bing's search results for Cyber Monday, right below the sponsored listings. Damningly, Sullivan backs this up with screen shots.
Could Microsoft actually be playing this crude of a game – eliminating rivals from the Bing search index to promote their own service at the height of the holiday season? When Sullivan asked the company what was going on, it claimed that it was merely trying to improve results for its users. Bing told Sullivan that “Consistent with our guidance to site owners, websites that seem to rely mostly on affiliate content or that offer only thin content often don't deliver the value searchers are looking for and may be demoted or removed from our index.”
Furthermore, this approach supposedly isn't new to Bing. Bing said “It's nothing new, and follows guidance we've given on our webmaster site. We don't have any specifics to share.” Sullivan, on the other hand, went digging for specifics at the link to “guidance to site owners” that Bing provided, and found...not exactly what you would expect.
MSN Optimization 
