The Courting of Bing

After our many recent problems with Google, we wound up taking a closer look at Bing. I’d heard that Bing was getting its act together after a somewhat shaky start, and that a lot of the people who used Bing now swore by it. Since my primary business is helping clients build web sites and adapt to social networks, I figured it was about time I re-visited Bing to see how it might help some of the web sites I maintain, and especially the Malleus Maleficarum web site.

The first thing I needed to do was to add the Malleus web site to Bing’s webmaster tools. Honestly, the last time I looked over Bing, they didn’t have webmaster tools. So after the pleasant surprise of finding them, I set out to see what this might mean to us and our campaign to recover some of our dwindling traffic (or at least figure out where it’s going).

Much to my surprise, our traffic doubled overnight, and tripled by the third night. Apparently there are a lot more people using Bing than is generally admitted. At least by Google.

So. Where does that put us? Well, nowhere, really. This isn’t a grand announcement. We’ve just sort of discovered a whole new audience for the Malleus Maleficarum web site. Or at least a new way to make our searches available. We’ll see how this Bing thing turns out. But for the moment, it looks promising. And it’s oh, so satisfying to be able to thumb our nose at Google a bit.